Collective management for landscape and biodiversity conservation in viticulture: The Life + BioDiVine project

Environmental awareness is globally rising among scientific community, politicians and general public. Biodiversity conservation is becoming a concern for farmers. Wine growers have to face new environmental challenges, both through new regulations but also for communication and marketing. Indeed customers and consumers are more and more demanding “green” products, and this also applies to wine. Among the different environmental issues (reduction of pollution, pesticides …) often seen as negative constraints, biodiversity management appears as a positive action, and thus a motivating aspect to work on.

Such collective projects are easier to set up if administrative or “territorial” limits such as Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée are respected. Many projects are currently starting or ongoing in France and Europe. If the content and goals of these projects are often based on conservation actions and biodiversity monitoring, it appears that no standard strategy exists to apply these projects, largely depending on the local context and organizations in charge of it.

A sound technical (agronomic) knowledge is needed to raise interest from farmers (pure ecological reasons are less adapted to this public), and financial assistance seems to be as well a key factor to obtain significant results. The Life+ BioDiVine project aims to reintroduce ecological infrastructures in intensive viticulture areas. Its success is strongly linked to involvement of local stakeholders as wine-boards and syndicates. In fact, it aims to be a project based on a “bottom-up” strategy (demand, motivation and steering committee through the land owners, wine growers) and associated to other local stakeholders. Applied on 7 demonstration sites in France, Spain and Portugal, it gives, apart from an opportunity for maintaining biodiversity, a bigger picture of nature conservation strategies in the agricultural context.