Missing Links in Predicting Berry Sunburn in Future Vineyards

Abstract

Sunburn in grapevine berries is known as a recurring disorder causing severe yield losses and a decline in berry quality. The transition from healthy to sunburnt along a temporal trajectory is not fully understood. It is driven by light-boosted local heat impact and modulated by, e.g., past environments of the berry and its developmental state. Events of berry sunburn are often associated with heatwaves, indicating a link to climate change. In addition, the sensitivity of grapevine architecture to changing environmental condition indicates an urgent need to investigate and adapt mitigation strategies of berry sunburn in future vineyards. In this perspective, we want to identify missing links in predicting berry sunburn in vineyards and propose a modeling framework that may help us to investigate berry sunburn in future vineyards. For this, we propose to address open issues in both developing a model of berry sunburn and considering dynamic canopy growth, and canopy interaction with the environment and plant management such as shoot positioning or leaf removal. Because local environmental conditions drive sunburn, we aim at showing that identifying sunburn-reducing strategies in a vineyard under future environmental conditions can be supported by a modeling approach that integrates effects of management practices over time and takes grapevine architecture explicitly into account. We argue that functional-structural plant models may address such complex tasks. Once open issues are solved, they might be a promising tool to advance our knowledge on reducing risks of berry sunburn in silico.

Climate Change, Grape Phenology, and Frost Risk in Southeast England

“…Tis raises the question of the impact of climate change on the complementary risk of acute heat events for UK viticulture, a matter that invites future research given that the best sparkling wine is produced in regions with moderate heat accumulation [55]. Increased heat may therefore pose a threat to grape health [56,57], with the prospect that some wine regions may become unsuitable for viticulture in the future due to heat extremes [7]. Tis is important in the context of the wider Southeast England region, as although the average climate may become more conducive to wine production and agriculture in general, heatwaves will double in frequency, with the likelihood of heat stress afecting crops projected to increase by a factor of fve with a global warming of 2 °C, as pointed out by Arnell et al [52].…”

Towards a Stochastic Model to Simulate Grapevine Architecture: A Case Study on Digitized Riesling Vines Considering Effects of Elevated CO2

“…This might be a consequence of the simple extrapolation of the linearized E-L-system, despite the beginning of flowering stage being only partially related to the number of leaves (‘about 16’), and mainly characterized by ‘first flower caps loosening’ [ 35 ]. While not yet considered in the functional-structural plant model on Riesling vine [ 12 ], these results suggest that one might use the developed model to also predict beginning of flowering that could become relevant when berry development is included in future versions [ 46 , 125 ]. Furthermore, due to the synchronization of organ development rates in the estimation of cardinal temperatures, we expect a good agreement with the speed of the architectural development of the plants between budburst and the beginning of flowering.…”

“…Moreover, an inclusion of further management practices, besides shoot positioning [ 12 ] and leaf removal [ 46 ], and their effects on growth are of interest to extend the applicability of such a virtual plant model. Bahr et al [ 125 ] laid out a concept on necessary extension of grapevine functional-structural plant models to study grapevine berry sunburn, a recurring problem for viticulturists linked to climate change [ 134 ]. We expect the inclusion of variability in architectural components to provide a more concise picture of the microclimatic conditions within grapevine canopies [ 47 , 49 ], which would enable precise forecasts of sunburn occurrence, but also of other health and quality aspects related to microclimatic conditions.…”

VISmaF: Synthetic Tree for Immersive Virtual Visualization in Smart Farming. Part I: Scientific Background Review and Model Proposal

“…The Helios model was primarily used to model grapevine and vineyard management. As shown by Bahr et al [69], Helios allows the estimation of sunburn damage to berry in the vineyard as a function of leaf structure, density, and position, as well as vineyard architecture. Another use of the model was that proposed by Salter et al [68] in phenotyping using a virtual chickpea plant as support for validation of a 3D reconstruction system using structure from motion (SFM) algorithms.…”