FRUDISTOR: an app to prevent storage disorders

Abstract

Since physiological disorders and parasitical storage diseases of fruit in the postharvest chain of apple fruit cause sizable economic losses and waste valuable resources, there is an important need to correctly identify symptoms and to understand disorder development in order to put in place better strategies to prevent these disorders from occurring. For these reasons, an EU-funded INTERREG V-project “Alpenrhein, Bodensee, Hochrhein”, started in 2015 for a three-year period. This project involves partners from different re-search institutions in Germany, Switzerland and Italy. Under the name Frudistor (the acro-nym of fruit disorders storage) an online platform for PCs and smart mobile devices has been generated on the site http://www.frudistor.de. The information is structured into descriptions of the origin, cause, prevention, susceptible cultivars, and disorders and dis-eases which can be easily confused with each other. Additionally, photos of symptoms are linked to the text. Several options to filter search results simplify disease and disorder identification. For example, the type of the symptom: internal and external, or time of ap-pearance. Currently, Frudistor contains more than 40 disorders translated into Italian, German, Dutch, and English. The idea of creating an application accessible to all, free, dy-namic, and expandable, was born from the desire to support users (producers, storekeep-ers, marketing, and consumers), making the process of harvest and storage increasingly more efficient and sustainable. The following report collects a part of the result of this work, presenting some of the main damage that occurs during storage. The individual articles were written by the various au-thors who participated in the project and have been published in various journals in Italy, Germany, and Switzerland.