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comprehensive effort was devoted to exploring, collecting and characterizing the local Maltese olive germplasm, often represented by ancient, monumental trees and by plants of uncertain origin. SSR and cp-SSR analysis of all samples enabled the identification of 46 genotypes and establishment of the correspondence between ancient trees, main local varieties and other Mediterranean cultivars. The application of plastid markers enabled identification of two lineages among Maltese genotypes, with more than 50% represented by lineage E2. Twenty-nine cases of grafting were identified among the various genotypes and lineages. In most cases, E1 canopies were grafted on E2 rootstocks, but reverse cases were also observed. The phylogenetic study of Maltese genotypes, together with hundreds of cultivars from the Mediterranean Basin and beyond, highlights the richness of Maltese olive diversity and drawing attention to the genetic similarity of some Maltese olive genotypes with neighboring Italian and Algerian varieties. These results underline the long-lasting presence of the olive in the country, contributing to the reconstruction of its phylogeny and demonstrating a possible autochthonous origin of many samples. Some still-living ancient trees are at serious risk of extinction due to abandonment, urban expansion and environmental threats. This study supports the preservation of the Maltese olive germplasm and highlights its importance as a rich genetic source to face new agronomical challenges and future climatic constraints., This research was funded by GAL XLOKK of Malta as a part of Measure 19.3 of the EU LEADER Program 2014–2020., peer-reviewed

Some olive cultivars and production regions around the world, although they may provide good quality olive oils, may not comply with the current commercial regulations establishing acceptable levels of sterols in extra virgin olive oils. The present study was driven by the hypothesis that olive growing environments, differing in thermal regime conditions, affect squalene and sterol contents of olive fruits. On the basis of differences in agronomic characteristics and oil composition, two olive cultivars (Arbequina and Coratina) were selected and sampled at different fruit development stages. Various models were examined to look for relationships between environmental thermal records and chemical parameters; those including the accumulated thermal time (ATT) and minimum temperatures showed the best fit. In both cultivars, the total and individual sterol contents were positively associated with ATT over all the fruit development and ripening period considered. In all cases, the data from Arbequina fit the models better than for Coratina and differences between cultivars in individual sterol contents were greater in the warmest growing environments. Overall, findings indicated a strong impact of the growing environment on squalene and sterol contents. Such an effect was associated with specific thermal characteristics of the olive growing sites; concentrations were found to be higher in the warmer northernmost sites than in the cooler southernmost ones. There was also an effect of the cultivar, particularly on the contents of ?-sitosterol, campesterol and total sterols. These latter results suggest greater sensitivity of sterol metabolism to temperature in cv. Arbequina

LIVINGAGRO addresses the challenge of knowledge and technological transfer in Mediterranean agriculture and forestry systems for achieving and sharing good practices aimed at sustainable production, thus protecting biodiversity, enhancing innovation transfer, increasing rural incomes and profitability for all stakeholders involved. Using an open innovation approach for co-creating economic and social values, improving interactions between the supply and demand of innovation, technological transfer and availability of research results, eliminating geographical and cultural barriers across involved Mediterranean countries, two Living Laboratories will be established focusing on olive multifunctional systems (Living Laboratory 1) and grazed woodlands (Living Laboratory 2).

Background The morphological analysis of olive leaves, fruits and endocarps may represent an efficient tool for the characterization and discrimination of cultivars and the establishment of relationships among them. In recent years, much attention has been focused on the application of molecular markers, due to their high diagnostic efficiency and independence from environmental and phenological variables. Results In this study, we present a semi-automatic methodology of detecting various morphological parameters. With the aid of computing and image analysis tools, we created semi-automatic algorithms applying intuitive mathematical descriptors that quantify many fruit, leaf and endocarp morphological features. In particular, we examined quantitative and qualitative characters such as size, shape, symmetry, contour roughness and presence of additional structures such as nipple, petiole, endocarp surface roughness, etc.. Conclusion We illustrate the performance and the applicability of our approach on Greek olive cultivars; on sets of images from fruits, leaves and endocarps. In addition, the proposed methodology was also applied for the description of other crop species morphologies such as tomato, grapevine and pear. This allows us to describe crop morphologies efficiently and robustly in a semi-automated way. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s13007-017-0261-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Olive tree is a vector of cultural heritage in Mediterranean. This study explored the biocultural geography of extra virgin olive oil (EVOO) from the cultivar Ogliarola campana in Campania region, Italy. Here, the rich cultural elements related to olive tree and oil represent a suitable case study for a biocultural analysis. We joined analytical techniques, based on stable isotopes and trace elements of EVOOs, with humanistic analyses, based on toponymy and historical data. In order to provide a science-based assessment of the terroir concept, we set up a new method of data analysis that inputs heterogeneous data from analytical and anthropic variables and outputs an original global evaluation score, named terroir score, as a measure of biocultural distinctiveness of the production areas. The analysis highlighted two distinct cultural sub-regions in the production area of Ogliarola campana: a continental cluster in the inner area of Irpinia and a coastal one around Salerno province. Finally, a biocultural map displays the diversity of heterogeneous variables and may support science-based decision making for territory valorisation. This novel biocultural analysis is a promising approach to substantiate the terroir concept with science-based elements and appears suitable to characterize local agri-food products with old tradition and historical data.

The phenotypic and genetic variability of local olives in a perspective of diversity conservation should be maintained andpreserved. Fourteen unknown olive genotypes were selected from abandoned and isolated plants in Umbria region andcharacterized by ten SSR markers. The molecular analysis led to identify ten previously unknown genotypes within the patrimony of the region, made up by about 10 main cultivars and more than 100 minor ones. Fruit samples were randomlycollected from the selected plants during two growing seasons and oil was extracted from each sample. Analyses of fatty acidcomposition, phenolic profile (flavonoids, phenolic acids, phenolic alcohols and lignans), tocopherols, squalene and sterols were performed on these oils. Significant differences were observed in terms of main fatty acids (e.g. oleic acid from 71.83to 76.73%), but not for the minor ones. The important differences were instead obtained on the amount of α-tocopherol,ranging from 149 to 583 mg kg−1, and on squalene, spanning from 1059 to 5447 mg kg−1. Evaluation of major and minorcompounds with the principal component analysis of the main oil quality parameters revealed differentiation according tothe genotypes. The analysis of neglected olive genotypes from a small area of cultivation has led to the identification of a promising source of variability for most sought-after traits, which could be exploited for new olive plantations and to magnifythe spectrum of local olive oils.

Olive pomace is an interesting agro-industrial byproduct that can be a potential raw material for densified biomass products. At first, 2-phase (2 PH) and 3-phase (3 PH) olive pomace pellets were analyzed in order to evaluate their quality in terms of the main parameters required by the European Standard EN 17225-6. The characterization of the pure pellets has shown important problems because of out of limits values of nitrogen, durability and copper in the two olive pomace. To improve the properties of olive pomace pellets, the possibility of manufacturing pellets by mixing olive pomace and olive tree pruning (PR) was investigated. Several blends at different weight ratios were analyzed in order to verify the effect of mixing on the pellet properties. It can be concluded that the physical properties of all mixtures are in compliance with the requirements of the standard. In particular, two best blends in terms of physical, chemical and mechanical characteristics were identified as becoming potential fuel for combustion and gasification applications: 75PR252 PH (75% pruning and 25% 2-phase pomace) and 50PR503 PH (50% pruning and 50% 3-phase pomace).

Olive cultivation is increasing around the world, expanding from its native area of cultivation. To meet this new demand, breeding is playing an important role to introduce into cultivation new cultivars with desirable attributes of olive oil quality. Eighteen seedlings, derived from 'Leccino' × 'Ascolana Tenera', 'Leccino' × 'Dolce Agogia' and 'Leccino' × 'Kalamata', together with parental cultivars, were selected based on their productivity. Fatty acid methyl esters (FAMEs) and phenolic compositions were evaluated. Characterization of the phenolic profiles was performed by liquid-liquid extraction with 80:20 (v/v) methanol/water and subsequent chromatographic analysis with UV-liquid chromatography and spectrophotometer absorption. To determine the FAME composition, samples were analyzed by gas chromatography-flame ionization detection (GC-FID). High variability was detected within and between the different cross progenies, with considerable deviation from their parents. In general, the highest values of total phenols (700 mg kg-1 oil) were measured in 'Leccino' × 'Ascolana Tenera' seedlings, with large amounts of individual phenols, such as forms of oleuropein and vanillic, p-coumaric, ferulic and cinnamic acids. Furthermore, a seedling from 'Leccino' × 'Ascolana Tenera' revealed interesting percentage of FAMEs, especially for oleic (85.42%) and linoleic (5.38%) acids. The study established the possibility of improving the quality of olive oil by cross-breeding of known cultivars. The best seedlings will be propagated for further evaluations such as agronomical, physiological and biochemical aspects.

Germplasm collections of tree crop species represent fundamental tools for conservation of diversity and key steps for its characterization and evaluation. For the olive tree, several collections were created all over the world, but only few of them have been fully characterized and molecularly identified. The olive collection of Perugia University (UNIPG), established in the years’ 60, represents one of the first attempts to gather and safeguard olive diversity, keeping together cultivars from different countries. In the present study, a set of 370 olive trees previously uncharacterized was screened with 10 standard simple sequence repeats (SSRs) and nine new EST-SSR markers, to correctly and thoroughly identify all genotypes, verify their representativeness of the entire cultivated olive variation, and validate the effectiveness of new markers in comparison to standard genotyping tools. The SSR analysis revealed the presence of 59 genotypes, corresponding to 72 well known cultivars, 13 of them resulting exclusively present in this collection. The new EST-SSRs have shown values of diversity parameters quite similar to those of best standard SSRs. When compared to hundreds of Mediterranean cultivars, the UNIPG olive accessions were splitted into the three main populations (East, Center and West Mediterranean), confirming that the collection has a good representativeness of the entire olive variability. Furthermore, Bayesian analysis, performed on the 59 genotypes of the collection by the use of both sets of markers, have demonstrated their splitting into four clusters, with a well balanced membership obtained by EST respect to standard SSRs. The new OLEST (Olea expressed sequence tags) SSR markers resulted as effective as the best standard markers. The information obtained from this study represents a high valuable tool for ex situ conservation and management of olive genetic resources, useful to build a common database from worldwide olive cultivar collections, also based on recently developed markers.

The kinetic behaviour of olive tree pruning (PR), two- (2PH) and three-phase (3PH) olive pomace and their blends was investigated under combustion condition using thermogravimetric analysis. PR was blended with 2PH and 3PH at different ratios (25:75, 50:50 and 75:25) and tested in the temperature range from ambient to 1000 °C in order to evaluate the co-combustion behaviour. Results showed that the thermal degradation of all samples can be divided into three regions (drying, devolatilisation, char oxidation) with different combustion properties, depending on the percentage of PR. Significant interaction was detected between the fuels, and reactivity of 2PH and 3PH was improved upon blending with PR. The iso-conversional methods, Ozawa-Flynn-Wall and Vyazovkin, were employed for the kinetic analysis of the oxidation process. The results revealed that the activation energy of PR was higher than the one of 2PH and 3PH, and the minimum value was obtained for25PR752PH sample.

The morphological analysis of olive fruits, leaves and endocarps may represent an efficient tool for the characterization and discrimination of varieties and the establishment of phenotypic relationships among them. In recent years, much attention has been focused on the application of DNA molecular markers due to their high capacity to efficiently and reliably discriminate cultivars. Here, we present a semi-automatic method of detecting various morphological parameters based on image analysis tools. A number of morphological parameters have been used to characterize olive germplasm collections from different countries. To date, for the morphological analysis of olives, old fashioned manual techniques (e.g. using screw gauge, gridded paper, etc.) have been used, or other unsuitable methods/softwares for handling the problem, due to the imposition of some prerequisites (e.g. color of the images background, position of the object, etc.). The novelty and the significance of our methodology lies in the fact that it is the first integrated methodology that provides automated morphological analysis of fruits, leaves and endocarps, without pre-processing manual tasks (cutting the fruits, etc.) or imposing prerequisites, after a manual binarised of the initial image. The underlying methodology is based on robust mathematical descriptors that can provide more accurate,rapid and consistent results regarding the shape description. In addition, the objective of this work is to serve as a useful further step in the development of computer-based techniques which can describe the whole morphology of crop species.

Renewable energies as indigenous source of energy will have an important role to play in reducing the level of energy imports, mitigate climate change and enhance energy security (Ericsson, 2006). Biomass offers a large unexploited technical potential and is currently competitive and economically viable (COM (97) 599). This study deals with the availability of the raw material (woody residuals from olive trees cultivation -pruning- and residuals from the olive oil extraction process -pomace-), its location and potential as a biomass source for energy production. A web-based survey was administered to farmers and olive oilproducers. The main aim was at identifying the most productive areas to assess suitable places for locating fuel production plants (ready-to-use fuels, namely synthetic natural gas (SNG) and diesel obtained through the Fischer-Tropsch synthesis process). Collected data were elaborated together with official statistics (Metadata from EUROSTAT, the Statistical Office of the European Union) and estimates of biomass amounts in the targeted areas were performed. The basic framework was drawn from conceptualization of the production frontiers. The coeffi cient, determined by mean of collected data average yield, had been used to assess the total biomass production at local level (regions) using data (olive growing areas and yields) derived from EUROSTAT.

Olive is a long-living perennial species with a wide geographical distribution, showing a large genetic and phenotypic variation in its growing area. There is an urgent need to uncover how olive phenotypic traits and plasticity can change regardless of the genetic background. A two-year study was conducted, based on the analysis of fruit and oil traits of 113 cultivars from fve germplasm collections established in Mediterranean Basin countries and Argentina. Fruit and oil traits plasticity, broad‐sense heritability and genotype by environment interaction were estimated. From variance and heritability analyses, it was shown that fruit fresh weight was mainly under genetic control, whereas oleic/(palmitic+linoleic) acids ratio was regulated by the environment and genotype by environment interaction had the major efect on oil content. Among the studied cultivars, diferent level of stability was observed, which allowed ranking the cultivars based on their plasticity for oil traits. High thermal amplitude, the diference of low and high year values of temperature, negatively afected the oil content and the oleic acid percentage. Information derived from this work will help to direct the selection of cultivars with the highest global ftness averaged over the environments rather than the highest ftness in each environment separately. EEA San Juan Fil: Mousavi, Soraya. Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche. Institute of Biosciences and Bioresources; Italia Fil: Mousavi, Soraya. Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche. Institute for Agricultural and Forest Systems of the Mediterranean; Italia Fil: De la Rosa, Raúl. Instituto Andaluz de Investigación y Formación Agraria, Pesquera, Alimentaria y de la Producción Ecológica (IFAPA). - Centro Alameda del Obispo; España Fil: Moukhli, Abdelmajid. Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA). Centre Régional de la Recherche Agronomique( CRRA); Marruecos Fil: El Riachy, Milad. Lebanese Agricultural Research Institute (LARI); Líbano Fil: Mariotti, Roberto. Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche. Institute of Biosciences and Bioresources; Italia Fil: Torres, Myriam Mariela. Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria (INTA). Estación Experimental Agropecuaria San Juan; Argentina. Fil: Torres, Myriam Mariela. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina Fil: Pierantozzi, Pierluigi. Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria (INTA). Estación Experimental Agropecuaria San Juan; Argentina. Fil: Pierantozzi, Pierluigi. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina Fil: Stanzione, Vitale. Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche. Institute for Agricultural and Forest Systems of the Mediterranean; Italia Fil: Mastio, Valerio. Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche. Institute for Agricultural and Forest Systems of the Mediterranean; Italia Fil: Zaher, Hayat. Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA). Centre Régional de la Recherche Agronomique; Marruecos Fil: El Antari, Abderraouf. Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA). Centre Régional de la Recherche Agronomique; Marruecos Fil: Ayoub, Salam. National Agricultural Research Center (NARC); Jordania Fil: Dandachi, Faten. Lebanese Agricultural Research Institute (LARI); Líbano Fil: Youssef, Hiyam. Lebanese Agricultural Research Institute (LARI); Líbano Fil: Aggelou, Nikolas. Mediterranean Agronomic Institute of Chania (MAICh). Department of Horticultural Genetics and Biotechnology; Grecia Fil: Contreras Valetín, Ana Cibeles. Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria (INTA). Estación Experimental Agropecuaria San Juan; Argentina. Fil: Contreras Valetín, Ana Cibeles. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina Fil: Maestri, Damián. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Instituto Multidisciplinario de Biología Vegetal (IMBV); Argentina Fil: Maestri, Damián. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina Fil: Belaj, Angjelina. Instituto Andaluz de Investigación y Formación Agraria, Pesquera, Alimentaria y de la Producción Ecológica (IFAPA). - Centro Alameda del Obispo; España Fil: Bufacchi, Marina. Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche. Institute for Agricultural and Forest Systems of the Mediterranean; Italia Fil: Baldoni, Luciana. Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche. Institute of Biosciences and Bioresources; Italia Fil: León, Lorenzo. Instituto Andaluz de Investigación y Formación Agraria, Pesquera, Alimentaria y de la Producción Ecológica (IFAPA). - Centro Alameda del Obispo; España