The Big Picture: A detailed view of vineyard ecosystems

"With such a massive and rich data set we are going to be pulling interesting things out of this for years," says Dr Sarah Knight, who has been studying soil biota as part of the wider grape growing ecosystem in New Zealand, to better understand the influence of season, region and management on vineyard biodiversity.

Sarah, who is a lecturer in the School of Biological Sciences at University of Auckland, says the seven year programme, with five years of data collection across two regions and 24 sites, has yielded an abundance of data sets that shed a light on vineyard soils and how they interact with vines, cover crops, and climate, in a contemporary (with herbicide) and future (no herbicide and low synthetic pesticide) setting.

"The real value of the Vineyard Ecosystems Programme has come down to the diversity and scale of the data we are collecting," she says. "It is designed to study the vineyard ecosystem as a whole rather than just an isolated aspect that might be of interest. So we are looking at the entire picture. That gives us a lot of power to understand how different parts of the vineyard might be connected. Then with this overlay of management practice, how management might be affecting those connections as well."

The project itself has been a "huge undertaking" in terms of data collection, "and that's where the bulk of the effort has gone," says Sarah. Now, in the "back end" of the programme, there is a lot of analysis. "Scientifically, it's an extremely valuable dataset,” she says. “It’s one of the biggest in the world and it’s world-leading in this space.”

University of Auckland’s statistics department is key to mining the findings, and Associate Professor Beatrix Jones and her team have built sophisticated models using the data “so we are able to evaluate different connections between different components that we might not necessarily see without the statistical knowledge going on in the background too”, says Sarah.

Sarah has previously done ground-breaking work on the microbial signatures of individual vineyards and their influence on wines, giving a new perspective on terroir. But “the big difference” in the Vineyard Ecosystems programme is in overlaying findings with the “added dimension” of management practice, “so we are able to understand how our management practices might be affecting our microbial communities”.

In one of the many spinoffs to the programme, two University of Auckland PhD students are now researching the scale of difference in microbe populations, says Sarah. “Is it simply that there are different things in different places? Different regions? Or is it smaller than that? Are the communities different on different vines on the same site? At what scale do we start to see that differentiation in our microbes that are important to our wine? So hopefully we get a few answers on that as well.”

Sarah says the information gleaned is of immediate value in some cases, but is also a reservoir for future research. “There’s certainly a lot of potential sitting in this massive data set.” That means they’re as busy generating hypotheses as they are results. “We are looking at where this might take us next.”