Agroforestry for enhanced arthropod pest management in Vineyards

Modern vineyards, characterized by monoculture and landscape simplicity, face a multitude of pest management issues, including heightened pest and disease pressure, reliance on agrochemicals, threats of pesticide resistance, and vulnerability due to climate change. Incorporating trees into and around vineyards through agroforestry practices such as alley cropping, windbreaks, hedgerows, and multi-story cropping has the potential to create diversified vineyard landscapes that could reduce pest and disease pressure, decrease the use of pesticides, and increase economic stability. This review summarizes the existing knowledge on arthropod pest management in heterogeneous woody vineyard landscapes and provides a foundation upon which future research on vineyard agroforestry systems can be built. Existing literature suggests that vineyards with adjacent and incorporated trees can reduce arthropod pest damage by increasing the abundance of predaceous insects and bats, which has been shown to increase parasitism and predation rates. These types of diversified vineyard landscapes may also control some viral and bacterial infections by controlling the insect vectors that transmit these pathogens, although certain trees can serve as alternative hosts for some viral vectors. Control of arthropods in vineyards also has the potential to be increased by the presence of trees because of the windbreak effect that trees provide, which allows for efficient and timely applications of pesticides at the precise moment when pest pressure is at the proper threshold. Because of the demonstrated benefits of trees in and around vineyards on arthropod insect and mite control, as summarized in this paper, intentionally incorporating trees into vineyard designs in the form of vineyard agroforestry systems could be a component of an effective arthropod integrated pest management strategy, and is a subject that warrants further research.