Improvement of Grapevine and Soil Management in Sustainable Viticulture

Dear Colleagues,

Viticulture fulfils a crucial role in agricultural production all over the world, and it is regarded as a production with a great environmental impact. The high competitiveness, and the need to always solve new problems in the sector, leads winemakers to introduce innovative and continually evolving practices in grapevine and soil management. Awareness of ecosystem services offered by soil in agriculture is dramatically increasing, so a better sustainability could be reached by tying viticulture production to the soil. Agroecology approaches in vineyards, e.g., the use of cover crops and organic amendments, are increasingly adopted to improve organic matter, biodiversity, soil water, and nutrient availability and to preserve soil from erosion and compaction. Innovative technologies, namely, information and communications technology (ICT), decision support systems (DSS), variable rate technologies (VRT), and remote and proximal sensors, can help to optimize vineyard management, saving resources and improving yield quantity and quality.  

This Special Issue will focus on trends in sustainable viticulture, including organic, conservation, and regenerative farming; management choices impacting erosion or biological, chemical, and/or physical soil quality; implications in soil ecology; carbon emission or sequestration due to different interrow soil management and farm inputs; advances in sustainable pest and disease management; economic and environmental assessment, including vineyard certifications; ICT and DSS to assess impact from new plantation or management of vineyards; and recent advances in precision viticulture; innovative techniques to survey and monitor soil and canopy, including remote and proximal sensing.

Dr. Lorenzo D'Avino
Dr. Rita Perria
Prof. Dr. Simone Priori
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Agronomy is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.