REVINE - Regenerative agricultural approaches to improve ecosystem services in Mediterranean vineyards

Natural and agricultural ecosystems, human health and plant production are being badly affected by the ongoing environmental changes that endanger the availability of water and fertile soil over the near future. Looking at the agricultural sector, water availability, environmental stresses, pollution and soil fertility have a strong impact on crops yield and quality. In this scenario, agricultural productivity in Mediterranean countries will be affected severely by adverse environmental conditions; rising temperatures (both during day and night) are being recorded, together with a general decrease and discontinuity in rainfall patterns. As for other crops, grape production, and the relative revenues, are strongly impacted by climate changes that affect both yield and quality potential and, in turn, the resulting wine or table grape. Grapevine is a plant of Mediterranean origin, well adapted to these climatic conditions, although over-use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers are commonly applied to satisfy consumers’ preferences and industry requirements. Additionally, average temperature increases are shifting phenology and ripening traits to a season where grapes are particularly susceptible to biotic and abiotic stresses (e.g., foliar or trunk fungal pathogens, water scarcity), often combined in field conditions. In light of this, the challenge of maintaining grapevine yield and quality under unrelenting climate changes is formidable. Improving or developing new eco-friendly management strategies (e.g. profitable cover crops) and selecting stress-adapted grape genotypes (e.g. rootostocks or neglected varieties endowed of stress tolerance or resilience) represent eco-sustainable approaches to this challenge, that can be tackled by exploring and exploiting regenerative agricultural practices promoting ecosystem services in a profitable farm context. In order to better understand and optimize their fitness and productivity, plants need to be considered as part of a complex network involving the entire field ecosystem, and in particular the microbial community of the rhizosphere. Only recently, biologists demonstrated that plants and phytobiome (or holobiont, composed by living microbes inhabiting plant tissues) interact with each other and with the environment, modulating plant responses to biotic and abiotic factors. In this regard, regenerative agriculture promotes soil biological activity, microbial biodiversity and cycling of organic matter. Regenerative farmers would require fewer pesticides and fertilizers, preserving the ecosystem services provided by micro- meso- and macrofauna living in soil. Moreover, this approach aims to the preservation of water resources by using the best agronomic practices and improvement of ecological and economic resilience.

Strategy 1. To define consortia of selected beneficial microbes supporting ecosystem services and to valorize vineyard wastes through the development of biofertilizer. In order to valorize the autochthonous biodiversity, indigenous bacteria and fungi, able to modulate plant physiological performances enhancing their resilience to climate change, can be isolated. REVINE will characterize microorganisms already isolated from local partners to build ‘beneficial microbial consortium’ (Synthetic microbial communities, SynComs) able to improve the microbial diversity and, in turn, enhance ecosystem services. Furthermore, to promote circular economy, REVINE will aim to valorize vineyard waste, by developing effective protocols for the production of biochar, compost, and digestates from pomace and pruning residues. These will be used as soil amendments and to favor microbial biodiversity Strategy 2. To transfer the identified agronomical practices and the developed biostimulants in field condition, to verify their effectiveness,and to integrate the results from SO1 into cultivation protocols aimed to reduce chemical treatment, restore soil biodiversity and improve plant resilience to biotic and abiotic stresses. Since technique and time of application depend on climate and geographical features, REVINE will identify the best field condition for each Mediterranean region involved in the project. The microbial consortia and the developed soil amendments will be tested under field conditions at the different Mediterranean areas, within collaborations among the research centers and the farmers involved in the Project. In addition, REVINE will also implement the cover crop techniques in the vineyard context, by evaluating plant species able to improve soil fertility (e.g. by recruiting fungal or bacteria symbionts) and drought stress resilience, as well as to increase farmers’ income). Furthermore, selected grapevine genotypes (deriving from already established breeding programs) will be tested in field conditions for the ability to cope with biotic and abiotic stresses. Strategy 3. To define the effect of the selected grapevine genotypes, cover crop consociations, amendments, biofertilizers, and microbial consortia on agronomic traits, resilience to biotic/abiotic stresses, and soil microbial biodiversity. To achieve such objective, REVINE will perform the characterization of the agronomic traits using targeted physiological, phenological and biochemical analyses. Then, REVINE will evaluate the ability of the selected strategies to enhance resilience regarding the abiotic (i.e. water deficiency) and/or biotic stresses by checking the plants priming status using eco-physiological and biochemical approaches. Eventually, the effect of microbial consortia, biochar, compost, consociation and biofertilizers on soil microbial community structures will be evaluated. Strategy 4. To identify the impact of climate change on the effect of the different treatments on the soil-borne pathogen populations. REVINE will exploit microorganisms identified in WP1 for their ability to enhance plant resilience against biotic stress, focusing in specific on soil-borne pathogens (nematodes, fungi and bacteria. REVINE will also assess the impact of predicted climate change on the behaviour of both plant pathogens and PGPs and BCAs microbes. Furthermore REVINE intends to evaluate the most important grape features after microbial inoculation in order to determine the physiological, biochemical and agronomic impact of the selected strategies. Strategy 5. To evaluate the impacts of climate change on the vine cropping systems and to assess the socio-economic contribution of the proposed project’s innovations on Mediterranean value chains and organizations. Appropriate environmental, economic and social tools/indexes will be used to evaluate the impact of the proposed approaches in each area. REVINE will increase uptake of regenerative viticulture practices by identifying motives and barriers for adopting new approaches by end-users and relevant stakeholders. REVINE will also draw on the best sustainable management practices identified within the project, to propose the planning of suitable agro-environmental measures for viticulture within the framework of the new Green Deal and the next Common Agricultural Policy. Strategy 6. To raise visibility of the global importance of crop adaptation to climate change through the regenerative approaches, to actively disseminate the REVINE findings among Mediterranean farmers, service providers, citizens, scientists and policy makers, and to spread these capacities among farmers and young researchers, thus enabling an environment for implementation and uptake of project results. REVINE will create a community of involved actors (farmers, extension services, academia, industry, policy makers...) to raise an early and broad application of project results. The project will also promote a mutual learning process and promote the systematic exchange of information and good practices to effectively use research findings, and building capacity of young researchers across the Consortium members. To maximize the stakeholder involvement by highlighting the importance of crop adaptation to climate change and exploiting the project results, REVINE will implement demonstration fields among the project Consortium. Strategy 7. To enhance networking, coordination and cooperation of the different institutions that share multidisciplinary expertise around the common program of research. REVINE wants to develop better reciprocal knowledge and promote trust-building among Consortium members maximizing links to relevant EU and national projects. This objective will also ensure that the project is successfully managed to comply with contractual guidelines and manage the risk in the project. Furthermore, the coordination will also supervise that the project is implemented in accordance with Responsible Research and Innovation principles (public engagement, open access, gender, ethics, and science education). Finally, this SO will set up proper data management procedures including common protocols (Standard Operating Procedures – SOPs) to harmonize measurements in all experimental trials, thus ensuring appropriate exploitation.

The impacts of the REVINE project activities will respond to actors’ and stakeholder needs: increase in the organic and mineral fraction of soils, with recovery of fertility; stable fixation of carbon dioxide in the soil; reduction of tillage with consequent decrease in consumption and emissions due to this practice; reduction of soil erosion, improvement of the hydrogeological security of the territories; reduction of groundwater pollution; reduction of the costs of treatments with pesticides. Multiple abiotic stresses in cropping systems are caused by complex combinations of environmental and agronomic factors; thus, they can be dealt with only by complex blends of innovations at the genetic, biological, and vineyard management levels. REVINE has been designed to find and implement multi-faceted solutions to improve grapevine resilience to climate change, and correspondingly it expects a multi-faceted impact on consumers and society, conventional and low-input farmers, organic farmers, extension services and professional advisors, breeding and researchers, policymakers, consumers and society. Below is a brief description of the impact paths. 1. Improve the biodiversity in the vineyard. The beneficial regenerative agriculture-mediated effects ameliorate soil structure and microbial biodiversity that in turn lead to crop resilience against biotic and abiotic stressful factors. Moreover, enrichment of beneficial microbes in the rhizosphere, such as plant-growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) and fungi (PGPF), are known to trigger the plant immunity inducing the priming state. REVINE intends to improve the biodiversity in the vineyards by using multiple approaches. Some key deliverables linked to this impact are: Collection of Mediterranean local varieties/ landraces of Vitis vinifera and other species of Vitis genera; Collection of Mediterranean microbiological consortia;Associations between vines and legumes that allow double profitability;Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) phenotyping data/protocols (Standard Operating Procedures, data in open databases); Management techniques adapted to local resilient varieties; Communication and dissemination products (training material, practice abstracts in local languages, guidelines, policy briefs, web media, ...) 2. Improve the fertility and water availability of soil. Regenerative agriculture rebuilds soil organic matter and restores degraded soil biodiversity, resulting in both carbon drawdown and improving the water cycle. REVINE intends to improve the organic matter and the water cycle in soil by using and promoting sustainable agricultural strategies (e.g. amendment, in particular biochar, compost, biofertilizers and biostimulants) that have been demonstrated to enhance the beneficial microbial community of rhizosphere and, the plant response to biotic and abiotic stresses. In particular, biochar is a carbon-rich substrate that has multiple effects and it can be used in agriculture as soil amendment. It increases soil water-holding capacity and nutrient-availability for plants, thus positively affecting plant growth and developing of their tolerance to water stress. Biochar modifies microbial habitats and favors the presence of plant beneficial microbes. All organic manuring will be produced from crop residues. REVINE intends to valorize agricultural waste and to increase farmers income promoting the circular economy. 3. Socio-economic impact. The impact of REVINE solutions may be limited if farmers are not convinced of their economic feasibility and if these innovations do not align to the values and needs of Mediterranean value-chain actors and of society at large. Thus REVINE will explore these aspects thorough case-studies analysis i) to assess whether smart management techniques and grape genotypes identified by the project may compensate for the economic losses caused by climate change and ii) to understand how innovation might promote (or undermine) social inclusion and equitable improvements to people’s capacities to adapt and drive change in dynamic social–ecological systems. 4. Impact on innovation capacity, creation of market opportunities and capacity building. The involvement of industry in the consortium and the implementation of specific activities dedicated to R&D, on-farm experiments, and innovation management development will enable translation of the project results into marketable products. Participating companies will scale-up selected REVINE solutions, thus increasing their own commercial competitiveness. REVINE includes a training and capacity building strategy that will be directed in particular to farmers and to young scientists.