Some critical issues in environmental physiology of grapevines: future challenges and current limitations

Abstract

The rapidly increasing world population and the scarcity of suitable land for agricultural food production together with a changing climate will ultimately put pressure on grape-producing areas for the use of land and the input of resources. For most grape-producing areas, the predicted developments in climate will be identical to becoming more marginal for quality production and/or to be forced to improve resource management. This will have a pronounced impact on grapevine physiology, biochemistry and ultimately production methods. Research in the entire area of stress physiology, from the gene to the whole plant and vineyard level (including soils) will need to be expanded to aid in the mitigation of arising problems. In this review, we elaborate on some key issues in environmental stress physiology such as efficient water use to illustrate some of the challenges, current limitations and future possibilities of certain experimental techniques and/or data interpretations. Key regulatory mechanisms in the control of stomatal conductance are treated in some detail and several future research directions are outlined. Diverse physiological aspects such as the functional role of aquaporins, the importance of mesophyll conductance in leaf physiology, night-time water use and respiration under environmental constraints are discussed. New developments for improved resource management (mainly water) such as the use of remote sensing and thermal imagery technologies are also reviewed. Specific cases where our experimental systems are limited or where research has been largely discontinued (i.e. stomatal patchiness) are treated and some promising new developments, such as the use of coupled structural functional models to assess for environmental stress effects on a whole-plant or canopy level are outlined. Finally, the status quo and research challenges around the ‘CO2-problem’ are presented, an area which is highly significant for the study of ‘the future’ of the grape and wine industry, but where substantial financial commitment is needed.