Design of cover crop management plans satisfying productive and environmental objectives

Correspondance: aude.ripoche@supagro.inra.frInternational audienceIntroduction : Cover crops can be introduced in vineyards to various ends. They protect soils against run-off and erosion, improve soil physical properties and reduce the use of herbicides. Yet, they compete with grapevines for soil resources (Celette et al., 2005) and consequently, the vine vegetative development and yield can be limited, and the grape quality affected (Chantelot et al.,2004). Therefore, designing cover crop management plans that would (i) satisfy a set of objectives related to both grapevine production and environment and (ii) produce good results despite the inter-annual variability of climate is a major challenge for vine growers. Several methods have been developed to optimize crop management planning (Gary, 2004; Loyce and Wery, 2006). They all consider a set of criteria that are used for evaluating and rating various combinations of technical options. In the Betha system, Loyce et al. (2002) adopted a method of multiple criteria analysis that combined the definition of a range of alternative management plans, the calculation for each candidate management plan of indicators associated to the various criteria, and the aggregation of these criteria for rating each candidate management plan. Finally, they considered the inter-annual weather variability to evaluate the robustness of the best management plans. This method has been used here for identifying cover crop management plans in vineyards that would satisfy production and environment criteria in the context of different soil water availabilities, and of the variability of a Mediterranean climate