Models for estimating leaf area in sunflower

The objective of this study was to obtain and to numerical models to estimate the leaf area in function leaves linear dimension in sunflower. Two experiments were conducted at the experimental area of the Plant Science Department of the Federal University of Santa Maria, Santa Maria, RS, Brazil. Plants of sunflower were collected starting 27 days after emergency (DAE). The disks method was used to determine the leaf area (LA). Leaves were dried in oven at 65 degrees C until constant weight. Linear, quadratic, cubic and power models between leaf area and length or width, and the product (length * width), were fitted. Models that apresented coefficient of determination lower than 0.90 were not selected. The statistic used to evaluate the performance of the models was the root mean square error (RQME). Models that had the best fit were power, quadratic and cubic using blade width as the independent variable. Leaf area in sunflower can be estimated with the power model, which was the most accurate, with width of the leaf.