1941-2023 overall annual intensity indicator data for grapevine pests and diseases over three French vineyard regions

TL;DR

This paper analyzes historical data on grapevine pests and diseases in three French regions from 1941 to 2023 to understand long-term trends and their impact on viticulture.

Contribution

The novel contribution is a long-term database and grading system for pest and disease intensity in French vineyards over 83 years.

Findings

A textual analysis method was developed to assess annual pest and disease intensity in three French wine regions.

The database includes key pests like European vine moth and diseases like downy mildew over an 83-year period.

The tool helps analyze historical trends and link them to environmental and market changes.

Abstract

Since the beginning of the 20th century, the official French agricultural warning service (Ministry of Agriculture) has published weekly reports and annual summaries of key pest and disease pressures. The summaries were based on a large number of plots, including untreated ones, located in many different regions, with different local editions in every region. They constitute a highly valuable body of literature on pest and disease presence and overall damage, notably in vineyards. We used this literature to develop a textual analysis and build an integrative grading system for assessing a posteriori annual pest occurrence and damage intensity over an extended period (1941 to 2023) in the Bordeaux, Champagne and Vaucluse wine-growing regions. To reconstruct the pest and disease occurrence and intensity over time in the three regions, we established a long-term database of annual grades. The various grapevine diseases include notably downy and powdery mildews, black rot, rotbrenner and gray mold and, for the phytophagous insects, European vine moth (Lobesia botrana) and vine moth (Eupoecilia ambiguella). This tool can be very useful for characterizing the epidemiological status of various years or vintages, and analyzing long-term trends versus more isolated events. This will allow us to better describe and understand historical pest and pathogen temporal dynamics and link them to biotic and/or abiotic contexts. This will be helpful for anticipating needed advances in grapevine protection against quantitative and/or qualitative loss and for adapting viticulture to global changes including climatic, regulatory and marketing dynamics.

Image, graphical abstract

Figures