2024 - Long-term historical characterization of French vineyard exposure to pests and diseases: a case study of the Bordeaux and Champagne regions

The French agricultural warning service has historically published weekly reports and annual summaries of key pest and disease pressures The summaries were based on a large number of plots, notably vineyards, monitored in different regions, with different local editions for each region. They constitute a highly valuable corpus of literature on pests' presence and overall damage in vineyards. We used this literature to develop a textual analysis and build an integrative grading system for annual pest occurrence over a long period (1961 to 2020) in the Bordeaux and Champagne regions. To reconstruct the pest occurrences over time in the two regions, we then established a long-term database of annual grades, including various grapevine diseases (mildews, rots, trunk diseases, etc.) and phytophagous or disease vector animals (moths, mites, scale insects, leafhoppers). In this paper, to present and illustrate the new methodology, we focus on two contrasting types of pests, i. e., two grape berry moth species (Lobesia botrana and Eupoecilia ambiguella) and two fungal diseases (rotbrenner and black rot). This tool can be very useful for characterizing the epidemiological status of various years and analysing long-term trends versus isolated events. This will allow us to better understand past pest evolutions and link them to biotic and/or abiotic contexts. This will help anticipate the necessary evolution of grapevine protection against quantitative and/or qualitative losses and adapt to global changes and regulatory or marketing evolutions.

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