The Douro region: wine and tourism

Current remote sensing strategies rely heavily on reflectance data and energy balance modelling using thermal imagery to estimate crop water use and stress. These approaches show great promise for driving precision management decisions, but still require work to better understand how detected changes relate to meaningful physiological changes. Under water stress, grapevines exhibit a range of responses involving both biological and physical changes within leaves and canopies.

Context and purpose of the study. `Grüner Veltliner´ is the most important Austrian white quality wine variety, which is mainly used to produce primary fruity wines.

Biodynamic agriculture, founded in 1924 by Rudolph Steiner, is a form of organic agriculture. Through a holistic approach, biodynamic agriculture seeks to preserve the diversity of agriculture and the existing interactions between the mineral world and the different components of the organic world. Biodynamic grape production involves the use of composts, herbal teas and mineral preparations such as 500, 501 and CBMT.
Several scientific studies have provided evidence on the effects of biodynamic farming on the soil, the plant and the wine. Numerous empirical opinions of wine growers support the existence of differences brought by such a management.

The wine sector is being directly affected by climate change. Temperatures above 30ºC can cause a lag between the ripening of the berry pulp (a rapid increase in sugar content) and the skin

The knowledge of the influence of soil conditions on the effects that different plant densities provoke in the agronomic grapevine behaviour becomes very interesting since it allows to focus the vineyard management on the optimization of the natural, hydric and human resources.