Data for: Above-ground dry mass and fruit geometries of 31 field muskmelon plants

Description

Methods

A total of 751 fruits from 31 Cucumis melo L. var. agrestis Naud. plants were collected for detailed study. Each fruit was photographed using a horizontal smartphone (iPhone 12, Zhengzhou, China), mounted on an adjustable tabletop phone mount, while placing the fruit on a test tube rack directly beneath the camera to ensure that the fruits were stably positioned horizontally and that the lens was focused on the fruit's center. To calibrate the deviation of the image size of each fruit from its actual size, we measured the maximum length of the fruit using a vernier caliper.

To obtain the planar coordinates of fruit 2D profiles, the photographs were converted into black-white images and saved as .bmp format using Adobe Photoshop CS2 (version 9.0; Adobe, San Jose, CA, USA). A program developed by Shi et al. (2018) and Su et al. (2019) developed in Matlab (version >= 2009a; MathWorks, Natick, MA, USA) was then used to extract the planar coordinates of each fruit profile from the corresponding .bmp black-white image.The function 'fitEPE' in the package 'biogeom' (version 1.3.5) (Shi et al., 2022) in R (version 4.2.1) (R Core Team, 2022) was used to estimate the numerical values of a, b, c₁, c₂, and c₃. The Nelder-Mead optimization method was used to minimize the residual sum of squares (RSS) between the observed and predicted y-values of C. melo var. agrestis fruit profiles. After obtaining the estimated parameters of the EPE, we used the surface area and volume equations for the solid of revolution (Narushin et al., 2022) based on the EPE to calculate the fruit surface area and volume for each fruit of the 751 fruits.

To compare the predicted volume of a fruit with its observed volume, we measured volume by submerging each fruit in water in a 100 mL graduated cylinder with a diameter of 3 cm and reading the observed volume of displaced water. The results were saved in the EPE_results.csv file.

The above contents were cited from He et al. (2023).

References

• Narushin, V.G.; Romanov, M.N.; Griffin, D.K. Egg and math: Introducing a universal formula for egg shape. Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sci. 2021, 1505, 169–177.
• R Core Team. R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing; R Foundation for Statistical Computing: Vienna, Austria, 2022. Available online: https://www.r-project.org/ (accessed on 1 June 2022).
• Shi, P.; Gielis, J.; Niklas, K.J. Comparison of a universal (but complex) model for avian egg shape with a simpler model. Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sci. 2022, 1514, 34–42.
• Shi, P.; Ratkowsky, D.A.; Li, Y.; Zhang, L.; Lin, S.; Gielis, J. A general leaf area geometric formula exists for plants—Evidence from the simplified Gielis equation. Forests 2018, 9, 714.
• Su, J.; Niklas, K.J.; Huang, W.; Yu, X.; Yang, Y.; Shi, P. Lamina shape does not correlate with lamina surface area: An analysis based on the simplified Gielis equation. Glob. Ecol. Conserv. 2019, 19, e00666.
• He, K.; Hui, C.; Yao, W.; Wang, J.; Wang, L.; Li, Q.; Shi, P. Evidence that field muskmelon (Cucumis melo L. var. agrestis Naud.) fruits are solids of revolution. Plants 2023, in press.