Morphological Characteristics of Grapevine Cultivars and Closed Contour Analysis with Elliptic Fourier Descriptors

Morphology is the most visible and distinct character of plant organs and is accepted as one of the most important tools for plant biologists, plant breeders and growers. A number of methods based on plant morphology are applied to discriminate in particular close cultivars. In this study, image processing analysis was used on 20 grape cultivars ("Amasya beyazi", "Antep karasi", "Bahceli karasi", "cavus", "Cevsen", "Crimson", "Dimrit", "Erenkoy beyazi", "Hafizali", "Karasabi", "Kirmizi", "Izabella (Isabella) ", "Morsabi", "Musgule", "Nuniya", "Royal", "Sultani cekirdeksiz (Sultanina)", "Yalova incisi", "Yerli beyazv", "Yuvarlak cekirdeksiz") to classify them. According to image processing analysis, the longest and the greatest projected area values were observed in "Antep karasi" cultivar. The "Sultani cekirdeksiz" cultivar had the least geometric mean diameter. The greatest sphericity ratios were observed in "Yerli beyaz", "Erenkoy beyazi" and "Amasya beyazi" cultivars. According to principal component analysis, dimensional attributes were identified as the most significant source of variation discriminant grape cultivars from each other. Morphological differences between the cultivars were explained by sphericity and elongation variables. According to elliptic Fourier analysis (EFA) results, grape morphology largely looks like ellipse and sphere. However, there are some cultivars that look similar to a water drop. The cultivars with similar morphology were identified by a pair-wise comparison test conducted with the use of linear discriminant analysis, and they were presented in a scatter plot. According to cluster analysis, present grape cultivars were classified into seven sub-groups, which indicated great diversity.