Research Summary
Chateau Les Vergnes, Bordeaux, France — In wine growing areas like the Bordeaux region, as much as 75 percent of the land area is devoted to agricultural production of grapes. Monocultures, where one crop takes over large areas of land, can lead to a decline in biodiversity among the vines and in surrounding areas. In recent years, wine customers and traders have started to take into consideration the relationship between grape production and the surrounding environment, and agrotourism is becoming more and more important.
Since increased biodiversity can help regulate vine pests naturally, wine growers are also looking at ways to enhance wildlife on the farm, including recovering locally extinct species. At the same time they are trying to reduce soil erosion and the risk of fertilizer and pesticide runoff. A variety of measures (mowing, sowing wild grasses, natural regenerating ground cover, forest edge management) have been proposed to achieve this sustainable approach, but the success of these efforts is difficult to measure. Farmers need to be able to rapidly and easily monitor a range of species to determine changes in biodiversity over time, in order to understand if new farm management techniques are effective.
The major research aim is to further employ an invertebrate Rapid Biodiversity assessment (RBA) method (deveopled in previous years) for non-specialists to observe change in levels of biodiversity in vineyards, and a classical botanical identification key. This RBA tool has the benefit that it can be used by Earthwatch volunteers and vineyard managers to assess changing levels of biodiversity caused by improving management practices at the vineyard. This will then be extrapolated, using of mapping to see the impacts at a landscape scale.
Meet the Scientists
Dr Maarten Van Helden
Associate Professor in the National School for Agricultural Engineers – Bordeaux (ENITA – B)
Born in the Netherlands. He studied Plant Protection at Wageningen Agricultural University in the Netherlands from 1981 to 1988, specialising in Entomology. His PhD research (1989-1994) subject was the resistance of lettuce to aphids, which he continued as a Post-Doc.
In 1997, he moved to the National School for Agricultural Engineers (ENITA - B) in France as an Associate Professor in Plant Protection. Currently his main research subject is integrated pest management in viticulture. This specifically focuses on landscape ecology of pest insects such as grape berry moths (major vineyard pest, responsible for destroying up to 90% of crop in badly affected vineyards) and leafhoppers (one of the largest families of plant feeding insects, feed by sucking on sap of vascular plants, therefore can be major agricultural pest), and the possibilities of conservation biological control through farmscaping practices such as hedgerows and ground cover.
He is also President of the Association for Research and Development of Sustainable Viticulture (ARD-VD). This association helps wine growers to manage their vineyards with better practices regarding the environment. His other research focuses on the management of virus-transmitting nematodes and phytoplasm transmitting leafhoppers in viticulture. His hobbies include gardening and darts. He is fluent in Dutch, German, French and English.
Josépha Guenser
Project Manager for the Association for Research and Development of Sustainable Viticulture – Bordeaux.
Josépha finished her studies at the Agriculture Engineering School of Toulouse (France) in 2008, working for 6 months with Maarten on biodiversity in the vineyards of the south of France.
Now she works for the Association for Research and Development of Sustainable Viticulture ‘ARD-VD).
The ARD-VD is a non-profit association dedicated to providing wine-growers technical solutions and field experiments to enhance knowledge on environmental aspects of farming. This concerns not only crop protection (alternatives practices to reduce use of pesticides, monitoring systems for diseases and pests,…), but also management of landscape and biodiversity.
Josépha is mainly implicated in the biodiversity and landscape topic. She works on the development of simple biodiversity monitoring methods focusing on arthropods and flora. She is also in charge of the organization of Earthwatch teams at Château les Vergnes, where volunteers help to test new methods and record data.
She is also providing technical and methodological support for landscape projects that are underway in several wine growing areas in France and (from 2011 onwards) in a new European project including Spain and Portugal.