State-of-the-art of tools and methods to assess vine water status

Abstract

Rising global air temperatures will lead to an increased evapotranspiration and altered precipitation pattern. In many regions this may result in a negative water balance during the vegetative cycle, which can augment the risk of drought and will require mitigation strategies. These strategies, ultimately, will mean the installation of irrigation systems in some winegrowing regions where vines were cultivated historically under rain-fed conditions and growers do not have many years of experience with vine water management. This review aims to provide a state-of-the-art summary of the recent and most important literature on vine water assessment for monitoring and adapting vineyard management strategies to production goals in view of global warming. Plant, soil and atmospheric methods are reviewed, and their advantages and drawbacks are discussed. Recent advances in plant water status measurement reveal the limitation of traditional techniques such as water potential, particularly in the context of drought and high vapor pressure deficit and the discoveries regarding hydraulic and stomatal regulation. New technologies can integrate heterogeneous sources of information collected in the vineyard at different spatial and temporal resolutions. Such new approaches offer new synergies to overcome limitations inherent to plant water status measurement techniques obtained directly or indirectly from proxy measurements.