Fruit yield of the raspberry (Rubus idaeus) under different pollination treatments, Reading, England, 2019-2021

Mesh bags and paintbrushes were used to exclude pollinators and deliver hand pollen supplementation to create the four pollination treatments. Scales and callipers were used to take fruit measurements and Image J software was used on photographs of a single fruits’ seeds spread on paper towels to count the number of seeds per fruit. Fruit set is presented as both success and failure and a percentage. Fruit weight is in grams to 3 decimal places and fruit length and width is in mm to 2 decimal places. Seed number is the number of seeds extracted from each fruit.

The data is across three csv files entitled Fruit_set.csv, Fruit_measurements.csv, Seed_no.csv. The data was collected on a single commercial soft fruit farm near Reading England (51°29′32″N, 000°52′28″W). The plants that fruits were collected from were from 6 different fields on the farm and were randomly selected within each field. The data was collected across 2019-2021 between June-September in each year. Crop plants were randomly selected across each field in each year; 19 in 2019 (Diamond Jubilee: n=9, Sapphire: n=10), 30 in 2020 (Diamond Jubilee: n=10, Sapphire: n=20) and 36 in 2021 (Diamond Jubilee: n=16, Sapphire: n=20). Sample size was increased in later years to provide contingency, since some inflorescences were lost from the experiment in 2019 and 2020, due to accidental picking or disease. For each plant three lateral branches with ≥9 flower buds were selected and randomly assigned to one of three treatments; insect pollination (IP), insect exclusion (IE) and insect exclusion with pollen supplementation (IES), for 2020 and 2021 this was exactly 10 buds per treatment on each plant. Any open flowers were removed at the start of the study. An insect pollination with pollen supplementation (IPS) treatment was included in 2020 and 2021 to give a maximum potential fruit production value, as this wasn’t provided in 2019 by the IES treatment. For how the data was collected see Lineage. The data was collected for the purpose of determining the pollinator dependence of raspberry to determine how important pollinators are in this system. Imogen Ryan (PhD) was responsible for the collection and interpretation of the data. Fruits that were damaged by humans or on damaged branches were excluded from the dataset as well as those infected with fungal diseases. Scales were calibrated using a 100g weight (included with the scales) before each weighing session and at regular intervals throughout.

The scale used was the Ohaus Scout STX Balances P/N 30296522 B. The callipers were Digital Vernier Caliper, Preciva Electronic Caliper 150mm with Extraordinary LCD Screen.