Launch of the TreeD-Resist project

What if the orchards of tomorrow were designed not only to produce… but also to withstand challenges? Faced with climate change, health pressures and dependence on inputs, current orchard systems are reaching their limits. How can we design orchards that remain productive whilst being more resilient to environmental and biological stresses? This is the central challenge of the TreeD-Resist project, winner of the latest call for proposals under the PEPR Agroecology and Digital programme, which was launched on 18 and 19 May at the INRAE Pays de la Loire centre in Angers (and via videoconference for some of the teams in Avignon and Montpellier in particular), bringing together a consortium comprising INRAE, Inria and CIRAD around a shared ambition: to better understand, measure and predict the immunity and resilience of agroecological orchards.

Drawing on pilot orchards at INRAE experimental units dedicated to four fruit species — apple, apricot, peach and citrus — the project will employ various phenotyping and modelling approaches: remote sensing, connected sensors, agrometeorological stations, field observations and omics analysis. This data will enable the reconstruction of trees in 3D, the automatic segmentation of their various parts, and access to localised traits related to their architecture, physiology and stress responses. The aim is to better characterise the functioning of trees and agroecological orchards in order to develop models capable of early stress detection and predicting trees’ responses to environmental hazards.

These two days of fruitful discussions enabled us to:

align the scientific objectives,
identify key interfaces between the project’s work packages,
and discover several experimental setups in the Horticultural Experimental Unit and the PHENOTIC greenhouses in Angers: apple orchards and experiments on immune responses in greenhouses and orchards.

A great start for this project at the interface between agroecology, plant sciences, modelling and artificial intelligence.

To find out more about the TreeD-Resist project: click here.

20260518_groupeKoM_Angers — Part of the TreeD-Resist project team on 18 May 2026 at the project launch in Angers. © PEPR AgroEcoNum / TreeD-Resist

Part of the TreeD-Resist project team on 18 May 2026 at the project launch in Avignon. © PEPR AgroEcoNum / TreeD-Resist

20260518_Montpellier — Part of the TreeD-Resist project team on 18 May 2026 at the project launch in Montpellier. © PEPR AgroEcoNum / TreeD-Resist

Visit to the PHENOTIC greenhouses in Angers on 18 May 2026 during the launch of the TreeD-Resist project. © PEPR AgroEcoNum / TreeD-Resist

A tour of the experimental facilities at the Horticultural Research Unit in Angers on 18 May 2026, during the launch of the TreeD-Resist project. © PEPR AgroEcoNum / TreeD-Resist

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Launch of the TreeD-Resist project

See also