Deliverable 10: Monitoring protocol of action C3 (promotion of mountain agriculture by means of vineyards)

This deliverable gives an in deep description of the monitoring tasks and network developed to assess and compare the evolution of the pilot experiences in comparison with the initial conditions, with the control plots and with the experiences in other areas of the project. This deliverable explains the monitoring protocol developed for one of the landscape management practices considered in this project, that is, the promotion of mountain agriculture by means of vineyards, both by the conversion of scrubs into vineyards and by the adaptation of agricultural practices to climate change conditions in long-established vineyards, with the purpose of improving the restrictive environmental conditions for agriculture in the mid-altitude Mediterranean mountains.

This deliverable presents the activities carried out to monitor the action C3. We have tried to define accurately all the activities that have been carried out in 2020 and that will be carried out in the following four years before evaluating the adaptation measures implemented. We have described all the environmental variables that are going to be measured, with different methodologies, timings, and protocols: (i) soil properties (soil analysis and soil moisture, soil microbial biodiversity), (ii) vineyard production (total production, grape quality, wine quality), (iii) hydrological and sedimentological response (infiltration rates, sediments, times to response), and (iv) site meteorological conditions (air moisture and temperature, rainfall).
The first section is a short introduction to the deliverable, with a briefly description of the pilot experiments and the main objectives of this deliverable. The second section describes the monitoring design implemented in both sites, La Rioja and Catalonia. The third section details the monitoring variables that will be measured in each plot, the frequency of the monitoring and the methodology employed to measure the variables. Finally, the fourth section summarizes all the monitoring tasks implemented in the forest management pilot experiences.