(Finance) – Protect and enhance the local wine sector. With this aim, the first georeferenced and interactive map of the Basilicata vineyards. The map – says Enea in a note – was developed in the context of PRO.S.IT project, financed with 260 thousand euros by the Region and carried on, among others, by Consortium Qui Vulture and fromUniversity of Basilicatain collaboration with Aeneas.
It’s about a web platformmade byInstitute of Methodologies for Environmental Analysis of the Cnrwhich allows operators in the sector to share information on the individual cadastral parcels of vineyards with geospatial data (altitude, slope, exposure), biophysical data (photosynthetic activity, biomass density and plant health) and on the presence of any harmful insects .
“With this project we have created, for companies and consortia of Lucanian viticulture, a dynamic tool, of immediate and easy use from computers and smartphones, based on open source technologies which, through the sharing of site-specific data, creates the basis for the participatory monitoring of Lobesia botrana, an insect widespread throughout Italy, which, feeding on grapes, causes serious damage to the harvest “, – explains Ferdinando Baldacchino, Enea entomologist of the Bioproducts and Bioprocesses Laboratory at the Trisaia Research Center (Matera) -. The sharing on the platform of trap capture data by winegrowers – he continues Canopy – will make it possible to obtain, in real time, information on the start and progress of the flights of this insect in a wider area of one’s vineyard; this will allow agricultural entrepreneurs the correct positioning of the insecticide intervention: from now on, Lucanian companies will have an innovative tool at their disposal to defend their vineyards in an increasingly effective and timely manner and preserve wine production “.
For the PRO.S.IT projectEnea took care, in particular, of distributing a questionnaire to wine producers, with the aim of knowing the strategies of struggle adopted against vine moth (Lobesia botrana) and the level of satisfaction achieved in the control. The survey involved the most representative Lucanian stakeholders, including private companies and associations, mainly in the Vulture wine-growing area, in the province of Potenza. The questions concerned in particular: the type of management (mandatory integrated pest management, voluntary integrated production and organic farming), the means of control used (chemical, biological insecticides and sexual confusion), the decision-making bases for the intervention (personal experience, indication of technicians, flight monitoring, egg sampling, phytosanitary bulletins and forecast models) and satisfaction with the results achieved. From the responses it emerged, for example, that the control of Lobesia botrana infestations is carried out with mixed strategies: chemical insecticides in 75% of cases, often even in the presence of sexual confusion applied to 50% of the vineyards under investigation, while only 25% use insecticides of biological origin. “These results – underlines Canopy – describe a dynamic viticulture attentive to sustainability, but still uncertain and evolving in the use of the technological means available, after the abandonment of phosphoric esters. Furthermore, the simultaneous use by agricultural entrepreneurs of multiple sources of information, including non-corporate sources such as phytosanitary bulletins, emerged clearly (75% of the sample). Hence, the need to develop a technological, informative, participatory and interactive tool, such as the PRO.S.IT web-GIS platform, which represents the ideal support for the first example of citizen science for the protection of the viticultural heritage. of our Region “.
Furthermore, the project team has developed methods capable of providing constantly updated information on the dynamics of growth of the vineyard, on the water status, on the sequestration of carbon dioxide by the plant and on the choice of rootstocks of the vine, but also practical agricultural crops for the protection of biodiversity such as, for example, spontaneous winter-spring grassing.
For what concern winemaking process (and the reduction of copper in grapes from organic farming), one of the main results obtained by the project concerned the setting up of a bank of autochthonous Basilicata wine yeasts isolated in different areas and varieties of the Region. The oenological characteristics of the different wine yeast strains have been summarized in a sheet prepared for the benefit of Lucanian transformers and includes an indication of the strain behavior for characterizing oenological parameters, such as fermentation performance, aromatic profile and peculiar characteristics, such as capacity to conduct fermentation with low doses of sulphites and to reduce copper.