Long-term temporal dynamics of an overall annual intensity indicator of grapevine pests and diseases in three French vineyards

Historically from the beginning of the 20th century, the French agricultural warning service has published weekly reports and annual summaries of key pest and disease pressures. The summaries were based on a large number of plots, notably vineyards including not-treated ones, monitored in different regions, with different local editions for each region. They constitute a highly valuable corpus of literature on pests and diseases presence and overall damage in vineyards. We used this literature to develop a textual analysis and build an integrative grading system for annual pest occurrence and damage intensity over a long period (1941 to 2023) in the Bordeaux, Champagne and Vaucluse regions. To reconstruct the pests and diseases occurrence and intensity over time in the three regions, we then 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 and vine moth. This tool can be very useful for characterizing the epidemiological status of various years or vintages, and analysing long-term trends versus more isolated events. This will allow us to better describe and understand past pests and pathogens temporal dynamics and link them to biotic and/or abiotic contexts. This will be helpful for anticipating the necessary progress in grapevine protection against quantitative and/or qualitative loss and adapting viticulture to global changes and regulatory or marketing evolutions.