Functional homogeneous zones (fHZs) in viticultural zoning procedure: an Italian case study on Aglianico vine

Abstract

Abstract. This paper aims to test a new physically oriented approach to viticulture zoning at farm scale that is strongly rooted in hydropedology and aims to achieve a better use of environmental features with respect to plant requirements and wine production. The physics of our approach are defined by the use of soil-plant-atmosphere simulation models, applying physically based equations to describe the soil hydrological processes and solve soil-plant water status.This study (part of the ZOVISA project) was conducted on a farm devoted to production of high-quality wines (Aglianico DOC), located in southern Italy (Campania region, Mirabella Eclano, AV). The soil spatial distribution was obtained after standard soil survey informed by geophysical survey. Two homogeneous zones (HZs) were identified; in each one a physically based model was applied to solve the soil water balance and estimate the soil functional behaviour (crop water stress index, CWSI) defining the functional homogeneous zones (fHZs). For the second process, experimental plots were established and monitored for investigating soil-plant water status, crop development (biometric and physiological parameters) and daily climate variables (temperature, solar radiation, rainfall, wind).The effects of crop water status on crop response over must and wine quality were then evaluated in the fHZs. This was performed by comparing crop water stress with (i) crop physiological measurement (leaf gas exchange, chlorophyll a fluorescence, leaf water potential, chlorophyll content, leaf area index (LAI) measurement), (ii) grape bunches measurements (berry weight, sugar content, titratable acidity, etc.) and (iii) wine quality (aromatic response). This experiment proved the usefulness of the physically based approach, also in the case of mapping viticulture microzoning.

Water status and must composition in grapevine cv. Chardonnay with different soils and topography and a mini meta‐analysis of the δ13C/water potentials correlation

“…This work also shows that great variations in grapevine water status are observable within short distances in vineyards, as already observed in previous studies . This variability can have important consequences on must composition, sugars and acids, and the effect of water status on must composition has already been shown in many other studies .…”

“…Eventually, it will be important to design experiments in order to provide additional validation tests to demonstrate the efficiency of the models, for example comparing the predictions to other measurements of the same biological phenomenon, such as machine-learning predictions of leaf water potentials to measured 13 C. 26 This work also shows that great variations in grapevine water status are observable within short distances in vineyards, as already observed in previous studies. 3,4,51 This variability can have important consequences on must composition, sugars and acids, and the effect of water status on must composition has already been shown in many other studies. 6, 10,16,51 This study report a backward approach, explaining the amount of water deficit from differences in must composition at harvest, which was chosen as the date of the commercial harvest in that field.…”

Temporal stability of electrical conductivity in a sandy soil

“…Literature shows that three is the most likely selected number of classes to represent soil spatial variability (Hedley et al, 2009;Jiang et al, 2012;Li et al, 2013), while other authors defined only two zones (Bonfante et al, 2015, De Caires et al, 2015.…”

“…Peralta et al (2013), Pedrera-Parrilla et al (2014), and Bonfante et al (2015) have also used EMI to establish management zones. The delineation of management zones within a given field is one of the most common uses of EMI data (Vaudour et al, 2015).…”

The immediate effectiveness of barley straw mulch in reducing soil erodibility and surface runoff generation in Mediterranean vineyards

“…The most common soil management techniques in Mediterranean countries consist of tillage (mechanical weeding) and no-tillage (chemical weeding) operations (García-Orenes et al, 2009), and both of them generally result in bare soils during the entire year Lasanta and Sobrón, 1988;Vaudour et al, 2015). However, alternative and more conservation-minded soil management practices have also been used like catch crops (Bonfante et al, 2015;García-Orenes et al, 2009), mulching (Jordán et al, 2011;Costantini et al, 2015), hydromulching (Prats et al, 2013), geotextiles (Giménez-Morera et al, 2010), natural grassing (Raclot et al, 2009) and rock fragments (Blavet et al, 2009).…”