Abstract
Image analysis of pits and grains provide alternative routes for overcoming the invasive approach of genomic tools in the investigation of archaeological or modern plant material, which is only seldom a viable option due to the complex and laborious methodologies required. Nevertheless, any investigation of pit morphology and cultivar interpretation requires a high quality, comprehensive dataset for comparison. Such a benchmark dataset for the morphology of olive (Olea europaea) pits is presented in this paper, designed to facilitate similar research and establish a base for future investigations. The dataset was established by image analysis of pits of 18 olive cultivars that were photographed in both lateral and dorsal positions. A dedicated MATLAB® code was developed to extract the silhouettes of each pit and to calculate 16 morphometric traits of each view of the pit. Altogether, a total of 1008 photos of 504 pits of the 18 cultivars, together with their detailed morphometric description and statistical analysis are available here. These were used to test the accuracy of the dataset and the new approach in representing the different cultivars.
Similar content being viewed by others
Acknowledgements
This project was supported by the Israel Science Foundation research, grant 332/21 and the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program, grant 101096539.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding authors
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Additional information
Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
About this article
Cite this article
Ben-Dor, E., Barazani, O., Bar-Oz, G. et al. Morphometric Properties of Olive (Olea europaea) Pits: A Dataset for Cultivar Identification and Analysis. Sci Data (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-07180-9
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-07180-9
