Climate resilience of European wine regions.

Over centuries, European vintners have developed a profound knowledge about grapes, environment, and techniques that yield the most distinguishable wines. In many regions, this knowledge is reflected in the system of wine geographical indications (GI), but climate change is challenging this historical union. Here, we present a climate change vulnerability assessment of 1085 wine GIs across Europe and propose climate-resilient development pathways using an ensemble of biophysical and socioeconomic indicators. Results indicate that wine regions in Southern Europe are among the most vulnerable, with high levels also found in Eastern Europe. Vulnerability is influenced by the rigidity of the GI system, which restricts grape variety diversity and thus contributes to an increased sensitivity to climate change. Contextual deficiencies, such as limited socioeconomic resources, may further contribute to increased vulnerability. Building a climate-resilient wine sector will require rethinking the GI system by allowing innovation to compensate for the negative effects of climate change.

Quality wines in Italy and France: A dataset of protected designation of origin specifications.

Italy and France are historically among the countries that produce the most prestigious wines worldwide. In Europe, these two countries together produce more than half of the wines classified under the Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) label, the strictest quality mark of food and wines in the European Union. Due to their long tradition in wine protection, Italy and France include highly detailed specifications in their wine PDO regulatory documents that are usually not available for other countries, such as specific information about the main cultivars that must be used to make each wine or the required planting density in the vineyards. However, this information is scattered throughout the documents of each wine production area and has never been extracted and homogenised in a unique dataset. Here, we present the first dataset that characterizes the PDO wines produced in Italy and France at very high detail based on the information from the official EU geographical indication register. For each country it includes a standardized list of the PDO wine names, linked with their specific requirements, such as the wine colour, type, cultivars used and maximum allowed yields. The unprecedented level of detail of this dataset allows for the first time the analysis of more than 5000 traditional wines and their legal and agronomic specifications. This gives insights into the interplay between the European Union quality regulation policy, the wine sector, and agronomic practices, enabling researchers and practitioners to analyze wine production in the context of specific regulations or economic scenarios.

A detailed land use/land cover map for the European Alps macro region.

Spatially and thematically detailed land use maps are of special importance to study and manage populated mountain regions. Due to the complex terrain, high elevational gradients as well as differences in land demand, these regions are characterized by a high density of different land uses that form heterogeneous landscapes. Here, we present a new highly detailed land use/landcover map for the areas included in the European Strategy for the Alpine Region. The map has a spatial resolution of up to 5 m and a temporal extent from 2015 to 2020. It was created by aggregating 15 high-resolution layers resulting in 65 land use/cover classes. The overall map accuracy was assessed at 88.8%. The large number of land use classes and the high spatial resolution allow an easy customization of the map for research and management purposes, making it useable by a broad audience for various applications. Our map shows that by combining theme specific "high-resolution" land use products to build a comprehensive land use/land cover map, a high thematic and spatial detail can be achieved.

An ecosystem service approach to the study of vineyard landscapes in the context of climate change: a review.

Vineyard landscapes significantly contribute to the economy, identity, culture, and biodiversity of many regions worldwide. Climate change, however, is increasingly threatening the resilience of vineyard landscapes and of their ecological conditions, undermining the provision of multiple ecosystem services. Previous research has often focused on climate change impacts, ecosystem conditions and ecosystem services without systematically reviewing how they have been studied in the literature on viticulture. Here, we systematically review the literature on vineyard landscapes to identify how ecosystem conditions and services have been investigated, and whether an integrative approach to investigate the effects of climate change was adopted. Our results indicate that there are still very few studies that explicitly address multiple ecosystem conditions and services together. Only 28 and 18% of the reviewed studies considered more than two ecosystem conditions or services, respectively. Moreover, while more than 97% of the relationships between ecosystem conditions and services studied were addressing provisioning and regulating services, only 3% examined cultural services. Finally, this review found that there is a lack of integrative studies that address simultaneously the relationships between ecosystem condition, ecosystem services and climate change (only 15 out of 112 studies). To overcome these gaps and to better understand the functioning of vineyard socio-ecological systems under climate change, multidisciplinary, integrative, and comprehensive approaches should be adopted by future studies. A holistic understanding of vineyard landscapes will indeed be crucial to support researchers and decision makers in developing sustainable adaptation strategies that enhance the ecological condition of vineyards and ensure the provision of multiple ecosystem services under future climate scenarios. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11625-022-01223-x.

A geospatial inventory of regulatory information for wine protected designations of origin in Europe.

The Wine Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) label is a European quality scheme that protects high quality wines by linking them to legally defined geographic areas and a set of specific production practices. Because of the tight relation between PDO wines and the specifications defined in the official regulatory documents, these products are highly susceptible to changes in climatic, environmental, or socioeconomic conditions. However, the content of these regulatory documents has never been systematically analysed and summarized in a single dataset. Here, we present the first geospatial inventory that organizes regulatory information about the 1177 wine PDO in Europe based on the documents from the official EU geographical indication register. It includes essential legal information that defines the wine PDO such as the geographic boundaries, authorized cultivars and maximum yields. This inventory opens new possibilities for researchers to accurately assess, compare and map the regulatory information in each wine region at an unprecedented level of detail, supporting decision makers in developing adaptation strategies for the preservation of PDO wine regions.

Upscaling ecosystem service maps to administrative levels: beyond scale mismatches.

As Ecosystem Services (ES) are the products of complex socio-ecological systems, their mapping requires a deep understanding of the spatial relationships and pattern that underpin ES provision. Upscaling ES maps is often carried out to avoid mismatches between the scale of ES assessment and that of their level of management. However, so far only a few efforts have been made to quantify how information loss occurs as data are aggregated to coarser scales. In the present study this was analyzed for three distinct case studies in the eastern Alps by comparing ES maps of outdoor recreation at the municipality level and at finer scales, i.e. high-resolution grids. Specifically, we adopt an innovative and flexible methodology based on Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis (ESDA), to disentangle the problem of the scale from the perspective of different levels of jurisdiction, by assessing in an iterative process how ES patterns change when upscaling high-resolution maps. Furthermore, we assess the sensitivity to the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP) by calculating global statistics over three grid displacements. Our results demonstrate that spatial clusters tend to disappear when their extent becomes smaller than the features to which values are upscaled, leading to substantial information loss. Moreover, cross-comparison among grids and the municipality level highlights local anomalies that global spatial autocorrelation indicators fail to detect, revealing hidden clusters and inconsistencies among multiple scales. We conclude that, whenever ES maps are aggregated to a coarser scale, our methodology represents a suitable and flexible approach to explore clustering trends, shape and position of upscaling units, through graphs and maps showing spatial autocorrelation statistics. This can be crucial to finding the best compromise among scale mismatches, information loss and statistical bias that can directly affect the targeted ES mapping.

Integrating supply, flow and demand to enhance the understanding of interactions among multiple ecosystem services.

A comprehensive understanding of the relationships among ecosystem services (ES) is important for landscape management, decision-making and policy development, but interactions among multiple ES remain under-researched. In particular, earlier studies often did not clearly distinguish between supply, flow and demand. Furthermore, the underlying mechanisms in complex socio-ecological systems remain less examined. In this study, we therefore aimed to assess interactions among eight key ES, adopting a multistep approach. For all ES, we mapped ES supply, flow and demand at the municipality level in the Alpine Space area. We applied correlation analysis and cluster analysis in order to analyse the linkages between ES and to identify bundles of ES. We used random forest analysis to explain the distribution of the ES bundles and to identify important drivers based on socio-ecological variables (e.g. land use/cover, climate, topography and population density). Our results demonstrate that trade-offs and synergies varied greatly for supply, flow and demand. We identified five ES bundles, distinguishing hotspots of ES supply and demand. Twelve socio-ecological variables correctly predicted the membership of 81% of the municipalities to the ES bundles. Our results suggest that a limited number of socio-ecological variables can explain the majority of the distribution of ES bundles in the landscape. Considering the spatial relationships between mountain regions and their surrounding lowlands, regional and transnational governance frameworks need to connect areas of multiple ES supply to areas of ES demand, and should account for the different levels and types of ES relationships.

Mapping the ecosystem service delivery chain: Capacity, flow, and demand pertaining to aesthetic experiences in mountain landscapes.

Accounting for the spatial connectivity between the provision of ecosystem services (ES) and their beneficiaries (supply-benefit chain) is fundamental to understanding ecosystem functioning and its management. However, the interrelationships of the specific chain links within ecosystems and the actual benefits that flow from natural landscapes to surrounding land have rarely been analyzed. We present a spatially explicit model for the analysis of one cultural ecosystem service (aesthetic experience), which integrates the complete ecosystem service delivery chain for Puez-Geisler Nature Park (Italy): (1) The potential service stock (ES capacity) relies on an expert-based land use ranking matrix, (2) the actual supply (ES flow) is based on visibility properties of observation points along recreational routes, (3) the beneficiaries of the service (ES demand) are derived from socioeconomic data as a measure of the visitation rate to the recreation location, and (4) the supply-demand relationship (ES budget) addresses the spatially explicit oversupply and undersupply of ES. The results indicate that potential ES stocks are substantially higher in core and buffer zones of protected areas than in surrounding land owing to the specific landscape composition. ES flow maps reveal service delivery to 80% of the total area studied, with the highest actual service supply to locations with long and open vistas. ES beneficiary analyses show the highest demand for aesthetic experiences in all-season tourist destinations like Val Badia and Val Gardena, where both recreational amenity and overnight stays are equally high. ES budget maps identify ES hot and cold spots in terms of ES delivery, and they highlight ES undersupply in nature protection buffer zones although they are characterized by highest ES capacity. We show how decision/policy makers can use the presented methodology to plan landscape protection measures and develop specific regulation strategies for visitors based on the ES delivery chain concept.

Using land use/land cover trajectories to uncover ecosystem service patterns across the Alps.

Managing multiple ecosystem services (ES) in agricultural landscapes is a challenging task, especially in regions with complex topographical and agro-ecological conditions. These challenges require ES assessment approaches that go beyond the case study level and provide multi-temporal information at a transnational level. We used a spatiotemporal approach to examine the impact of specific land use/land cover (LULC) trajectories on eight ES for the past 150 years. We show how a spatially explicit ES upscaling procedure, from case study to an Alpine-wide level, based on topographical, agro-ecological and socioeconomic parameters, can improve our understanding of ES dynamics and bundles. Our results indicated that the provision of multiple ES was not stable during the 150 years surveyed, mainly depending on the prevailing land management type and the biophysical conditions. ES bundle mapping enabled us to identify landscapes with consistent socioecological characteristics that are most likely to either enhance or diminish the provision of specific types of services. By introducing a spatiotemporal perspective into ES assessment, we provide clear evidence of the dynamic nature of ES provision and contribute to identifying processes and drivers behind these interactions. Our results emphasize that mountain ES supply is particularly sensitive to long-term LULC change, to biophysical characteristics and to regional socioeconomic conditions. They indicate the benefit of integrating of ES bundles into environmental policies at national and transnational level.