Integration of plant resistance, cropping practices, and biocontrol agents for enhancing disease management, yield efficiency, and biodiversity in organic European vineyards

The Project involves 9 research groups in 5 EU Countries. The VineMan.org Project aims at designing, developing, and testing innovative cropping systems for organic vineyards in Europe. In detail, the project focuses on enhancing organic grape production and its stability through a more efficient control of the grape diseases. The Project aims at improving disease control, which is one of the main and most difficult tasks in organic viticulture, integrating plant resistance against fungal pathogens, cropping practices, and use of BCAs depending on environmental conditions. VineMan.org is organised in 8 Work Packages (WPs), each of them led by a competent partner, and they are closely related one to each other. Management of the project activities, knowledge, IPR and exploitation of the results have a specific WP (WP1). Methods for inducing the innate immunity of plants against fungi and oomycetes pathogenic to Vitis vinifera will be evaluated in WP2. The effect of some viticulture management options on the development of the target diseases will be investigated in WP3, with particular focus on canopy structure and cluster/berry morphology modifications. WP 4 is devoted to the study of the relationships between the target pathogens and the environmental conditions with emphasis to the development of weather-driven, mechanistic, dynamic models for predicting plant disease epidemics. In WP5, the fitness, impact, and efficacy against the main grape diseases, will be evaluated in four BCAs representing bacteria and fungi including yeasts already registered in the EU as microbial biopesticides. WP6 will be focused on the development of new strategies based on design-assessment-adjustment cycle. Two WPs will be aimed to field trials (WP7) and to the evaluation and monitoring of the microbial communities present on grape leaves and berries (WP8)