Terroir 2020 banner
IVES 9 IVES Conference Series 9 Partitioning of seasonal above‐ground biomass of four vineyard-grown varieties: development of a modelling framework to infer temperature-rate response functions

Partitioning of seasonal above‐ground biomass of four vineyard-grown varieties: development of a modelling framework to infer temperature-rate response functions

Abstract

Aims: Forecasting the biomass allocation among source and sinks organs is crucial to better understand how grapevines control the distribution of acquired resources and has a great meaning in term of making decisions about agricultural practices in vineyards. Modelling plant growth and development is one of prediction approaches that play this role when it concerns growth rates in response to variation in environmental conditions. This study was aimed to model the dynamics of current year’s above‐ground biomass in grapevine. Furthermore, the development of a relatively simple growth modelling framework aimed at the derivation of cardinal air temperatures for growth in grapevine.

Methods and Results: Trials were carried out over three growing seasons in field conditions with four grapevine cultivars. To compare the differences of growth-allocation models among cultivars, the non-linear extra-sums-of-squares method was used. Using measurements of mean daily air temperature and dry mass increments a beta-function model was fitted to the data and used to estimate cardinal air temperatures. Shoot growth and biomass allocation differed significantly among cultivars. The application of the non-linear extra-sums-of-squares procedure demonstrated to be a feasible way of growth models statistical comparison among cultivars. The results of this study highlight parameters most involved in the phenotypic variability of shoot growth. Variations among cultivars result from environmental and genetic factors. The temperature response functions obtained, confirm the initial working hypothesis that because the varieties may have either different temperature optima or different thresholds that a unifying model cannot be achieved.

Conclusions: 

These results suggest that some caution should be taken when incorporating shoot development and biomass partitioning coefficients in a growth model. Use of common coefficients estimates for all cultivars for dynamic modelling approaches, in fact, may result in a poor representation of the data early or late during the course of the season.

Significance and Impact of the Study: The described approach can be used to account for complex variation in seasonal growth patterns and provides insight into how well a cultivar may be matched to a particular site.

DOI:

Publication date: March 17, 2021

Issue: Terroir 2020

Type: Video

Authors

Franco Meggio* and Andrea Pitacco

Department of Agronomy Food Natural Resources Animals and Environment, University of Padova, Viale dell’Università 16 35020 – Legnaro (PD), Italy

Contact the author

Keywords

Above-ground grapevine biomass, growth model, biomass partitioning coefficients 

Tags

IVES Conference Series | Terroir 2020

Citation

Related articles…

Weather classification over the Western Cape (February, 1996 – 2000) and viticultural implications in the Stellenbosch wine district

Une étude préliminaire des situations météorologiques journalières a été réalisée pour l’Afrique du Sud et pour les mois de février (période de maturation des raisins dans la Province occidentale du Cap), à l’image de la classification synoptique réalisée aux latitudes tempérées en France (Jones & Davis, 2000), afin d’étudier les relations entre le climat et la viticulture à des latitudes plus basses.

Mathematical models of the dynamics of fermentation of wine yeasts under the influence of vitamins

Biomass accumulation in yeast has been studied in this work in terms of their role in fermentation processes. So, biotin is involved in many reactions and nitrogen metabolism disorders

Reconstructing ancient microbial fermentation genomes from the wine residues of Herod, Roman king of Judea

The fortress of the Herodium, built towards the end of the first century BCE/ante Cristo, on the orders of Herod the Great, Roman client king of Judea, attests the expansion of Roman influence in the eastern Mediterranean. During archaeological excavations of the Herodium in 2017[1], a winery was discovered on the ground floor of the palace, with an assortment of clay vessels in situ, including large dolia – clay fermentation vessels each capable of fermenting up to 300-400 L of wine. Thanks to the recent progresses in the field of paleogenomics[2], we could analyse the organic material consistent with grape pomace at the bottom of these vessels, by extracting and sequencing the DNA using shotgun metagenomics and targeted capture, aiming for enrichment of DNA from fermentation associated microbes.

Rare earth elements in grapes and soil: study of different soil extraction methods

Lanthanides, together with scandium and yttrium, make up the group of Rare Earth Elements (REEs). An official method for analysis of the bioavailable REEs accumulated by plants, depending mainly on soil characteristics, chemical speciation in soil and the specific ability of the plant, is still lacking.

Climate ethnography and wine environmental futures

Globalisation and climate change have radically transformed world wine production upsetting the established order of wine ecologies. Ecological risks and the future of traditional agricultural systems are widely debated in anthropology, but very little is understood of the particular challenges posed by climate change to viticulture which is seen by many as the canary in the coalmine of global agriculture. Moreover, wine as a globalised embedded commodity provides a particularly telling example for the study of climate change having already attracted early scientific attention. Studies of climate change in viticulture have focused primarily on the production of systematic models of adaptation and vulnerability, while the human and cultural factors, which are key to adaptation and sustainable futures, are largely missing. Climate experts have been unanimous in recognising the urgent need for a better understanding of the complex dynamics that shape how climate change is experienced and responded to by human systems. Yet this call has not yet been addressed. Climate ethnography, coined by the anthropologist Susan Crate (2011), aims to bridge this growing disjuncture between climate science and everyday life through the exploration of the social meaning of climate change. It seeks to investigate the confrontation of its social salience in different locations and under different environmental guises (Goodman 2018: 340). By understanding how wine producers make sense of the world (and the environment) and act in it, it proposes to focus on the co-production of interdisciplinary knowledge by identifying and foreshadowing problems (Goodman 2018: 342; Goodman & Marshall 2018). It seeks to offer an original, transformative and contrasted perspective to climate change scenarios by investigating human agency -individual or collective- in all its social, political and cultural diversity. An anthropological approach founded on detailed ethnographies of wine production is ideally placed to address economic, social and cultural disruptions caused by the emergence of these new environmental challenges. Indeed, the community of experts in environmental change have recently called for research that will encompass the human dimension and for more broad-based, integrated through interdisciplinarity, useful knowledge (Castree & al 2014). My paper seeks to engage with climate ethnography and discuss what it brings to the study of wine environmental futures while exploring the limitations of the anthropological environmental approach.