Innovative strategies for soil management in vineyards and olive groves were stated by mobilizing and integrating the current knowledge concerning management alternatives to chemical inputs including, for instance, use of permanent grassing or temporary cover crops, floral margins, mechanical and physical weeding, and mulching.
WP4 will design innovative soil management strategies by unique and strong integration of pre- existing and newly generated knowledge and tools. WP4 will compare the risks and assess the balance between costs and benefits of the innovative soil management strategies developed by iterative interactions between generation of candidate soil management strategies and experimentation. A design-assessment-adjustment cycle will be adopted to ensure continuous validation and improvement of the innovative soil management strategies.
A systematic literature review were carried out to retrieve all the relevant literature and data; then, an ex-ante meta-analysis were conducted to identify best candidate alternatives for reduction of chemical inputs.
Results from previous EC projects (i.e., LIFE+ SOIL4WINE and Core Organic Cofund BIOVINE) were included too. Best candidate alternatives were selected by analyzing not only avoidance/reduction of herbicides and plant protection products, but also reduction of chemical fertilizers, increase of biodiversity and effect on plant growth, yield and produce quality. Results from literature search and meta-analysis were then used to develop a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis to identify best candidate alternatives for reduction of chemical inputs, as the basis to integrate alternatives and design innovative strategies to be tested.
