The life+ BioDiVine project: implementation of collective strategies for biodiversity conservation in viticulture landscapes

Abstract

Biodiversity conservation appears today as one of the main environmental issues, at the same level as energy consumption or global climate change. Endangered species conservation in natural ecosystems, which remains a matter of specialists, is today well known. But the importance of general (or even “common”) biodiversity conservation is nowadays identified and affects a larger public in its every-day habits. Indeed, as landscape simplification seems to be one of the biggest parameters involved in this decrease, this question targets mainly land management at a large scale. Viticulture areas are most of the time intensively managed, not only in the wine plots but also in terms of land use at the appellation scale. The Life+ BioDiVine project, taking place in six demonstration sites in France, Spain and Portugal, aims to combine biodiversity conservation and wine production. Apart from an experimental axis focusing on the link between landscape and biodiversity, it promotes conservation actions such as planting hedgerows, encouraging ground-cover, sowing fallow plots. It appears that no standard strategy exists to apply this second axis, because it is very depending on the local context, on two different aspects: content of actions (species selected, locations for actions …) and logistics (stakeholders involved in dissemination of actions). Nevertheless, some key aspects can already be underlined, as participation and commitment of local structures and stakeholders, bottom-up strategy (demand  coming from professionals), financial help, vulgarization of local scientific results, explanations on technical and agronomic side of the proposed actions (ecological arguments alone are not sufficient). On most sites, the project took a while to be accepted and planned actions (meters of hedgerows planted, surfaces sown) are gradually increasing. In any case, the complexity of biodiversity imposes to gather a very large spectrum of skills: collective management is needed to work efficiently on this topic.