Visual observation of drought symptoms allows to assess the efficiency of complex drought tolerance strategies in grapevines

Abstract

The grapevine (Vitis vinifera L.) is a drought tolerant crop species that can be cultivated without irrigation in dry climates, even with rainfall as low as 350 mm/year. Drought tolerance strategies involve, however, complex mechanisms. A multitude of strategies to cope with drought have been identified, and these are based on a wide range of physiological processes or structural features. Some of these strategies are short-term and involve adjustments on the time scale of minutes or hours, others are long-term and are implemented over an entire season or even across several years. Drought tolerance is highly variable among varieties. Identifying the most drought tolerant varieties for dry climates allows to make optimal use of increasingly scarce fresh water resources, either by maintaining dry farming wherever possible, or by minimizing the need for irrigation water where this practice is mandatory. As drought episodes become more frequent and intense under climate change, the issue of drought tolerance in increasingly addressed in the scientific literature. In most studies on drought tolerance in grapevine, only one strategy is investigated. These studies allow a better understanding of the particular mechanism involved in the strategy investigated, but the results are generally not of much interest for end-users, because one single mechanism cannot explain how grapevines behave in production conditions. After reviewing some of the major drought tolerance mechanisms in plants, a practical approach is proposed: visual observation of drought symptoms across a wide range of varieties in a common garden, scored on a range from 0 (no visible symptoms) to 5 (severe visible symptoms). These symptoms cannot always be related to a particular strategy or mechanism, but can be considered as a global assessment of the efficiency of the strategy implemented by the grapevine variety. The potential contribution of this approach to the study of drought tolerance mechanisms in grapevine, as well as its limitations, are discussed.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the Bordeaux Wine and Viticulture Experimental Facility (INRAE, https://doi.org/10.17180/75AW-3519) for the maintenance of the experimental plot. The authors also wish to thank L. Marolleau for her assistance in 2022, and the Conseil Interprofessionnel des Vins de Bordeaux (CIVB) for its financial support.