Abstract
Biodiversity is an increasingly important aspect of wine production. The assessment of agro-ecosystem biodiversity is highly complex due to the heterogeneity of the elements involved in the evaluation. For this reason, wine companies have expressed a need for a decision support system (DSS) capable of dealing with this complexity, integrating assessments referring to the whole production system within a single tool. In this study a DSS developed for wine sector biodiversity management assessment is introduced. The DSS, called BIOPASS®, is made up of different sections relating to three compartments in the winemaking process (the soil, the vine and wine). Assessment of the physical, chemical and biological components of soil is a key element of the DSS. We investigate the relationship between biological soil quality (represented by the QBS-ar index), environmental conditions and the type of farming (organic or conventional). 70 soil samples were analysed in different Italian viticultural contexts. The model highlighted the relationships between QBS-ar and meteorological variables (air temperature and precipitation) as well as a positive relationship with organic farming systems. These results provide useful information for understanding agroecosystem biodiversity and will be integrated within the DSS for assessment of soil quality.
Highlights
Despite increasing interest in biodiversity in the agricultural sector and the tools that have been developed to investigate this subject [1,2,3] for the wine sector, aspects involving agroecosystem biodiversity and its functional role in relation to vines, must and wine are difficult to understand and manipulate
This method, proposed by Parisi et al [36], is based on the principle that the greater is the sensitivity of a soil arthropod taxon to variability and perturbation of soil conditions, the greater is the importance of the taxon as an indicator of soil quality
We investigated how environmental conditions and farming systems influence the composition of the soil arthropod investigated With how environmental farming systems community
Summary
Despite increasing interest in biodiversity in the agricultural sector and the tools that have been developed to investigate this subject [1,2,3] for the wine sector, aspects involving agroecosystem biodiversity and its functional role in relation to vines, must and wine are difficult to understand and manipulate. Among the methods applied to investigate soil biological quality, the “Qualità biologica del suolo” (QBS)-ar Index is one of the most frequently applied in the agricultural sector This method, proposed by Parisi et al [36], is based on the principle that the greater is the sensitivity of a soil arthropod taxon to variability and perturbation of soil conditions, the greater is the importance of the taxon as an indicator of soil quality. QBS-ar Index is an to apply and understand index that positively responds to the need to identify easy and affordable tools for assessing biodiversity [14] This index does not provide any information regarding the abundance of individuals of various species, focousing the analysis to soil arthropods, as reported by Yan et al [48]. Data from different meteorological stations close to the sampling points identify the possible relationship between the pedological and biological characteristics of the soils. Data from different meteorological stations close to the sampling points were collected
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