Jeffrey C. Hall

it. The global agribusiness company Syngenta, which was set up in 2000 in the merger of the agricultural divisions of Novartis and AstraZeneca, also supports the project. Principal investigator Maarten Van Helden from the National School for Agricultural Engineers at Bordeaux has been running the project for around two years with his research staff and Syngenta employees, but this year, volunteers from the general public recruited by Earthwatch will be participating for the first time. Viticulture in places like the Bordeaux region is ideally suited for the development and study of sustainable agriculture, as its primary focus is not on quantity but on quality and character. The natural environment around vineyards, known as the ‘terroir’ helps to create the specific character of a wine. Therefore, wine growers have a strong interest in preserving or even enhancing the terroir, which could be defined by elements such as hedgerows, small forests, or rivers and lakes. Van Helden’s project aims at a better understanding of the biodiversity in such environments and providing farmers with new ideas as to how they might enhance it. The hope is that natural biodiversity, possibly including species that were lost and then reintroduced, will contribute to a natural regulation of vine pests and will also help to prevent erosion and land degradation, and avoid run-off of fertilisers and pesticides. While some “farmscaping” measures have already been tried in some areas and are recommended in farming guidelines, their success needs to be monitored in the long term, such that future measures can be based on solid scientific evidence. When reconsidering their production methods, wine growers will also be able to benefit from the recent publication of the complete genome sequence of the Pinot Noir grapevine. Anne-Françoise AdamBlondon, who was involved in the sequencing work, commented on the biodiversity project: “I think that it is a very interesting objective; in parallel it could be interesting to introduce more diversity in terms of grapevine cultivars.”