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Evaporative demand determines the relative transpirational sensitivity of deficit-irrigated grapevines

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Abstract

A common irrigation strategy is to replenish the soil water reservoir according to evapotranspiration (ET). However, the ET from plants under deficit irrigation is not well explored and is normally assumed to be a constant fraction of their respective well-watered condition. In the current experiment, we hypothesized that the ratio between the ET of well-watered (WW) and water deficit (WD) grapevines is not constant but depends on the reference ET (ETO). The hypothesis was tested using lysimeters over two consecutive seasons to measure the ET of WD grapevines (Vitis vinifera L.) that were irrigated at 35 % of a second set of lysimeters with WW vines. The WD treatment started at veraison and resulted in a quick depletion of the soil water reservoir; thereafter a relatively stable soil water content (θ) and crop coefficient (KC) were measured. The ET of the WD vines was 20–75 % lower than that of the WW vines, depending on the reference evapotranspiration (ETO). Under high ETO, the difference between the treatments was much larger than under low ETO. The dynamic ratio between the ET of the treatments demonstrates the difficulty in predicting the ET of WD plants and suggests that irrigation according to a constant fraction from a WW plant might result in either excessive or insufficient irrigation amounts. The high correlation between instantaneous stomatal conductance (g s) measurements and KC emphasizes the advantage of utilizing g s to improve current irrigation models.

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Acknowledgments

The work was part of the IRRIGATE (Intelligent Irrigation for Grape Quality) project in collaboration with NETAFIM L.T.D. The project was funded by the Chief Scientist of the Israeli Ministry of Economy and the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. We thank Mr. Diego Chiabà for his support in lysimeters set-up and Mr. Moreno Greatti for his assistance in vineyard management.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Agricultural, Food, Environmental and Animal Sciences, University of Udine, Udine, UD, Italy

    Uri Hochberg, Jose Carlos Herrera, Enrico Peterlunger & Giorgio Alberti

  2. The French Associates Institute for Agriculture and Biotechnology of Drylands, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Sede Boqer Campus, Midreshet Ben-Gurion, Israel

    Asfaw Degu & Naftali Lazarovitch

  3. Wine Research Centre, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

    Simone Diego Castellarin

Authors
  1. Uri Hochberg
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  2. Jose Carlos Herrera
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  3. Asfaw Degu
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  4. Simone Diego Castellarin
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  5. Enrico Peterlunger
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  6. Giorgio Alberti
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  7. Naftali Lazarovitch
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jose Carlos Herrera.

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Communicated by E. Fereres.

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Hochberg, U., Herrera, J.C., Degu, A. et al. Evaporative demand determines the relative transpirational sensitivity of deficit-irrigated grapevines. Irrig Sci 35, 1–9 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00271-016-0518-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00271-016-0518-4

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