The landscape in the development of vineyard regions: an application to the ACO Dão and ACO Bairrada (Central Portugal)

Challenges associated with climate change, such as soil erosion and drought, have impacted viticulture across wine regions globally in recent decades. As winegrowers struggle to maintain yield and quality standards under these conditions, methods to adapt to and mitigate the impacts of climate change have become more prevalent. One potential mitigation strategy is to enhance symbiotic interaction of grapevine roots with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF).

This project aims on monitoring the plant development and comparison of the effects of various training systems on vine fertility and physiological processes.

Intensification is considered one of the major drivers of biodiversity loss in farmland. The more intensive management practices that have been adopted the last decades, contributed to species declines from all taxonomic groups. Moreover, agricultural intensification has led to an important change of land use. Complex, mixed agro-ecosystems with cultivated and non-cultivated habitats have been converted to simplified, intensive and homogeneous ones with severe effects on biodiversity.

Sunburn is a physiological disorder that leads to yield and quality losses in a range of fruits such as grapes and apples. It affects the visual appearance and the composition of the fruit, leading to irreversible changes and ultimately, cell death in extreme situations.

The influence of climatic conditions on the development of the vine and on the quality of the wines no longer needs to be demonstrated at the scale of the vineyard, by the regional climatic characteristics, determining on this scale the viticultural potentialities (Huglin, 1978; Branas, 1946; Riou et al ., 1994); but also on a local scale, at the level of the basic terroir unit (Morlat, 1989), by the landscape differentiation of the natural environment inducing climatic variability within the same vineyard, and partly explaining differences in functioning of the vine, in connection with the processes of maturation and the quality of the wine (Becker, 1977 and 1984; Morlat, 1989 and Lebon, 1993a). According to these authors, the climatic diversity in a wine region constitutes in addition to the edaphic component, an important component of characterization of the Basic Terroir Units (UTB).