I wanted to know the number of seeds produced for a scattered agroforestry species, Faidherbia albida. It produces seeds in pods where the number of seeds per pod is 10-20. Now the challenge is how is it possible to best estimate the total number of seeds plant using non-destructive sampling methods. I have come across methods to non-destructively sample quantities for of fruit for fruit trees, but not for these type of trees. Does anyone know how it is possible to quantify seeds/tree for Faidherbia albida?
pods evntually drop when dry. You may eventually put some basket with a fine net in a frame and count the pods /basket. This can be related to tree strip areas by relating the number of pods or seeds in basket area to total one
Hi Tesfay... just fence crown diameter area of to protect goats from picking and estimate the total area. drop a sampling quadrants. collect the sample through out the season and estimate the number and weight of the pods. estimate what is left on the tree. Hope this helps. Good luck!
You can also try Randomized Branch Sampling (RBS) techniques. To apply this tool, you should have someone who can climb the tree, and of course a permit to harvest terminal limbs.
unless there are many pods, you can randomly select some trees and randomly select 1/4s of the crown of each and estimate the number pods in the 1/4. a sample of pods can be collected across sampled trees to estimate the number of seeds per pod. as pod number is likely positively related to DBH, some sort of stratification based on dbh could be done or DBH could be used as a covariate to estimate number of pods per tree. more is needed but that is a direction to go.
Fecundity in trees can be roughly estimated by extrapolating the data gathered on number of pods per tertiary branch, the number of tertiary branches in a secondary branch, number of secondary branches per primary branch and the total number of primary branches in tree. This may vary with species depending on the branching pattern and uniformity in the sub braches within a primary branch. If it is highly skewed, then we may need to arrive at the number of primary branches which represent the typical branching pattern and those that are not quite representative. It is also necessary to estimate the number of seeds per pod based on an average of about 100 pods from different primary and secondary branches.
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