Innovative and interactive tool for improving soil ecosystem services in viticulture

The LIFE+ project SOIL4WINE “Innovative approach to soil management in viticultural landscapes” aims to develop new viticultural systems focused on achieving better soil management through providing cost-effective solutions improving soil ecosystem services. The proposed solutions focus on: i) cover crops in the mid-row and in headlands around vineyard to prevent erosion, increase biodiversity and control relevant fungal pathogens (i.e., reduce the dispersal by rain splashes of primary inoculum of downy mildew present on leaf litter), ii) permanent organic mulching in the vine row, obtained by moving the sward of a permanent seeded grass, for sustainable weed management, iii) superficial water control or underground drainage system to regulate excess of water; iv) change of soil management equipment to reduce compaction and remove hardpan. To successfully transfer the knowledge acquired within the project, an innovative ICT tool was developed. The tool supports grape growers in implementing and maintaining the best solutions (i.e., soil management practices) for mitigation of threats affecting soil health in each specific situation. It is a stand-alone tool, meaning that it does not require the intervention of external experts (consultants, specialists, etc.), yet it allows farmers to self-evaluate their specific treath(s), take right decisions about the necessary mitigation measure(s), implement them following good agricultural practices and, finally, check the success of the intervention; it can therefore be considered a DSS. A first checklist allows the user to describe the site and a computing engine provides synthetic numerical indexes and ratings related to soil potential threats of the site. Vineyards’ monitoring protocols and related input data user interfaces are proposed to the user to verify whether the potential risk provided by the computing engine are real or not. Successively a decision engine suggests best practices to be implemented in vineyard to decrease the risk of soil threats and a registration module allows the user to register in the tool the activities performed in the vineyard. Finally, a third checklist enables to perform an objective evaluation of the soil´s threats changes after the mitigation solution’s implementation and understand if corrective or maintenance actions are required.