Abstract
To participate to the 18th International Symposium GiESCO 2013 (Group of
international Experts of vitivinicultural Systems for CoOperation) from July 7th to
11th at the “Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade do Porto” – Portugal.
• To present the innovative canopy management tool, the “canopy architecture App”
that the University of Adelaide has developed with results obtained from the GWRDC
funded project “UA 08/03”.
• To visit the world’s renowned Douro wine Region in Portugal
• To visit Prof. Javier Tardaguila at La Rioja University, Spain, to discuss and review
on the previous Wine Australia funded project (GWT 1117) outputs, to discuss the potential
extensions of the collaboration and review papers to be submitted to the Australian
Journal of Grape and Wine Research.
• To present a seminar on the results obtained during my stay at the University of La
Rioja in 2012 at the same university
Summary
The 18th International Symposium GiESCO 2013 was held from July 7th to 11th at the “Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade do Porto” – Portugal.
The topics of discussion for this conference included:
Methodology and Ecophysiology
Water relations
Mountain and hot regions viticulture
Environment: climate and soil
Vineyard management, yield and quality
Training systems
New concepts and advanced technologies in Viticulture
General viticulture
Sustainable viticulture
Precision viticulture
Mechanical harvesting and spraying
Mechanical winter and summer pruning
Mechanization systems, automation and economics
More than 200 delegates attended the conference. About 60 oral presentations and 150 posters were discussed for a total of over 200 papers published in the two volumes conference proceedings.
A very informative tour of the Douro wine region was also organised.
Key discussions, interesting conference presentations and possible collaborations will be discussed in greater detail later on this report.
As part of this project, I spent one week at the University of La Rioja (UoLR) to work collaboratively with the viticulture group led by Prof. Javier Tardaguila. During my previous visit to the same group in 2012 I have been working on hyperspectral imaging (HI) applied to grapevine physiology. Findings from the work conducted in 2012 demonstrated that it is possible to build a calibration for the prediction of grapevine water potential from wholecanopy non-invasive HI taken outdoors. The objective of this second visit was to summarise the results in a scientific paper to be submitted to the Australian Journal of Grape and Wine Research. Also, the results have been presented at the 9th International Symposium on grapevine physiology and biotechnology that was held in Chile in April 2013.