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Topics - rfielding

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Tropical Fruit Discussion / extreme breadfruit
« on: February 26, 2021, 02:49:03 PM »
Hi everyone,

I'm a geographer based in South Carolina with a research interest in Caribbean food security. Most of my work to date has been on fishing and whaling but I've recently been reading a lot on breadfruit. It's a remarkable crop, as many here know, and is being discussed by NGOs and development agencies in terms of its potential to alleviate hunger throughout many world regions. One problem, though, is its extreme intolerance of cold. I've read the Breadfruit Institute's guide on its suitability range (linked below), and have seen a recently-published paper on how that range might expand under climate change (Mausio et al. 2020). I've begun to wonder about the extreme limits of breadfruit's growth, specifically, what is the furthest from the tropics that breadfruit has successfully been grown?

I suppose I should restrict the question to breadfruit trees rooted in the ground, outdoors, that have successfully fruited. In my reading I've mostly focused on trees growing in Florida, and I've heard of specimens as far north as Bokeelia and Loxahatchee (both 26.7°N). Does anyone here know of an example further north than this? And, since this is a global forum, I'm also interested to learn about breadfruit trees growing as far south as possible past the Tropic of Capricorn.

Please feel free to respond here, or via email (rfielding@coastal.edu) if you have anything to share about the extremes of breadfruit growth, or just about breadfruit in general.

Thanks very much,
Russell Fielding

Breadfruit Institute's range data and maps:
https://ntbg.org/breadfruit/care/regions/

Mausio paper (I'd be happy to share the PDF upon request):
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0228552

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