National EcoVineyards Program

Biodiversity in an agricultural landscape provides significant benefits to a grower and the community in general through a range of obvious and imperceptible actions, commonly known as ecosystem services. In a vineyard context, these ecosystem services could include the predatory insects that feed on grapevine pests, or the improvement in soil health provided by groundcovers (cover crops) grown undervine or between the rows. The objective of this project is to develop and implement a national adoption program to contribute to desired practice change outcomes, specifically: • to increase the land area dedicated to enhancing functional biodiversity by 10 per cent, and • to increase the use of vineyard cover crops and soil remediation practices by 10 per cent. The need to grow resilience and future proof vineyard production in response to climate change and increasingly extreme weather events is a priority for the sector. Improved management and understanding of how functional biodiversity underpins the capacity to create better buffered production systems and address the breakdown in function of natural systems.