A Worldwide Perspective on Viticultural Zoning

This article reviews viticultural zoning concerns and issues, from a worldwide perspective. The needs of the everexpanding international wine market, and thus zoning objectives, have seen significant changes in recent years.  Consequently, more countries and individual wine-producing regions have been involved in zoning studies.  Although many of these studies were initiated in Europe, zoning needs reach far beyond the countries endowed with centuries-old viticultural history. The demarcation of registered designations of origin or protected geographical indications is one of the most obvious zoning aims. Viticultural zoning originated in the XIXth century in Europe, but is now widely applied in even the most recent emerging wine-growing countries of the New World. Other important zoning aims, not necessarily related to demarcating operations, often involve segmenting a vineyard territory into homogeneous units for pest management, land division, vineyard-restructuring operations, harvestquality management or site selection for new vineyards. The homogeneous units obtained through viticultural zoning are frequently referred to as ‘terroirs’. However, their spatial scale and the qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis may vary greatly, depending on the individual authors and the characteristics of the vinegrowing region, and consequently it is difficult to make international comparisons. Viticultural zoning studies can be divided broadly into two main approaches: the first approach is based largely on the geographic differentiation of wine, grape, or grapevine characteristics, while the second approach focuses on the geographical differentiation of land capability or vineyard suitability studies in which soil and climate are normally the key environmental variables used with varying degrees of importance. Although viticultural zoning is not always synonymous with mapping and spatial analysis, this practice is changing due to the enhanced use of geomatics. For example, digital mapping methods and remote sensing techniques have revolutionized viticultural zoning on all levels, ranging from the single plot to the regional level. On the field or local scale, the suitability approaches may include precision viticulture, which is mostly directed towards an understanding of grapevine ecophysiological functioning. On the regional or global scale, suitability approaches may be oriented towards the characterisation of broad geographical patterns of land use. The challenge with the different approaches is to compare the results derived at the regional level with those of the sample sites on the local scale. This paper provides some examples of the various approaches that are likely to enable zoning comparisons at the various spatial scales, including the international level

Mapping tillage practices over a peri-urban region using artificial neural networks applied to combined spot and asar/envisat images

5th Workshop on Hyperspectral Image and Signal Processing: Evolution in Remote Sensing. WHISPERS, Gainesville, USA, 25-/06/2013 - 28/06/2013International audienceThis study aimed at assessing the potential of combining synchronous SPOT4 and ENVISAT/ASAR images for mapping tillage practices of bare agricultural fields over a 220 km²-peri-urban area located in the western suburbs ofParis (France).The approach relied on topsoil roughness measurements combined with information about tillage operations: 28 reference zonesdemarcated according to soil map information, the visual interpretation of the SPOT4 infrared coloured image and their standard deviation of surface height were related to the backscattering coefficient of the ASAR image (R² 0.70). They were then used for training/validating neural networks on co-registered 20 m-SPOT/ASAR 6 bands with 15 bootstrapping iterations. The overall mean validation accuracy was 94.9%, while the producer's and user's mean validation accuracies were 91.6 - 81.5% and 61.8-75.4% for smooth and rough surfaces respectively. The SPOT/ASAR synergy thus enabled to map soil tillage operations with reasonable accuracy

An overview of the recent approaches to terroir functional modelling, footprinting and zoning

Notions of terroir and their conceptualization through agro-environmental sciences have become popular in many parts of world. Originally developed for wine, terroir now encompasses many other crops including fruits, vegetables, cheese, olive oil, coffee, cacao and other crops, linking the uniqueness and quality of both beverages and foods to the environment where they are produced, giving the consumer a sense of place. Climate, geology, geomorphology and soil are the main environmental factors which make up the terroir effect on different scales. Often considered immutable culturally, the natural components of terroir are actually a set of processes, which together create a delicate equilibrium and regulation of its effect on products in both space and time. Due to both a greater need to better understand regional-to-site variations in crop production and the growth in spatial analytic technologies, the study of terroir has shifted from a largely descriptive regional science to a more applied, technical research field. Furthermore, the explosion of spatial data availability and sensing technologies has made the within-field scale of study more valuable to the individual grower. The result has been greater adoption of these technologies but also issues associated with both the spatial and temporal scales required for practical applications, as well as the relevant approaches for data synthesis. Moreover, as soil microbial communities are known to be of vital importance for terrestrial processes by driving the major soil geochemical cycles and supporting healthy plant growth, an intensive investigation of the microbial organization and their function is also required. Our objective is to present an overview of existing data and modelling approaches for terroir functional modelling, footprinting and zoning on local and regional scales. This review will focus on two main areas of recent terroir research: (1) using new tools to unravel the biogeochemical cycles of both macro- and micronutrients, the biological and chemical signatures of terroirs (i.e. the metagenomic approach and regional fingerprinting); (2) terroir zoning on different scales: mapping terroirs and using remote- and proxy-sensing technologies to monitor soil quality and manage the crop system for better food quality. Both implementations of terroir chemical and biological footprinting and geospatial technologies are promising for the management of terroir units, particularly the remote and proxy data in conjunction with spatial statistics. Indeed, the managed zones will be updatable and the effects of viticultural and/or soil management practices might be easier to control. The prospect of facilitated terroir spatial monitoring makes it possible to address another great challenge in the years to come: the issue of terroir sustainability and the construction of efficient soil/viticultural management strategies that can be assessed and applied across numerous scales

The FOOTPRINT software tools: pesticide risk assessment and management in the EU at different spatial scales.

Original paper can be found at: http://www.ask-eu.com/default.asp?Menue=149&AnbieterID=586 [Full text of this paper is not available in the UHRA]In the EU-project FOOTPRINT three pesticide risk assessment and management tools were developed, for use at different spatial scales. The three FOOTPRINT tools share the same underlying science, based on the consistent identification of environmental characteristics driving the fate of agriculturally applied pesticides and their interpretation to parameterise state of the art modelling applications thus providing an integrated solution to pesticide risk assessment and management in the EU