EGU22-8231

https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-8231
EGU General Assembly 2022
© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Disentangling the main sources of evapotranspiration in a vineyard

Flavio Bastos Campos1, Leonardo Montagnani1,2, Fadwa Benyahia1, Torben Oliver Callesen1,
Carina Veronica González1,3, Massimo Tagliavini1, and Damiano Zanotelli1
1
Free University of Bolzano, Bolzano Bozen, Italy (flavio.bastoscampos@natec.unibz.it)
2
Forest Services, Autonomous Province of Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy
3
Instituto de Biología Agrícola de Mendoza, Mendoza, Argentina

Evapotranspiration (ET) is a complex phenomenon that responds to soil water availability, plant
development, weather variations and climate change in many magnitudes, from leaf to ecosystem
scale. Disentangling the different sources contributing to the total ET at the ecosystem level could
contribute to a better understanding of the single process and the overall ET dynamics.

To tackle this goal, we established an Eddy Covariance station in a vineyard in Caldaro, South Tyrol,
Italy, where cv. Chardonnay and cv. Sauvignon blanc are cultivated. The vineyard soil is covered by
grasses and drip irrigation is available. We attempted to partition the total evapotranspiration
(ETec) data obtained into the vines transpiration (Tv), the vines’ canopy evaporation (Ev) and the
understory evapotranspiration (ETu), the latter comprising the soil evaporation and the
transpiration of the ground-level vegetation. By this Ecophysiological Partitioning Approach (EPA)
the ecosystem ETEPA is the sum of Tv, Ev and ETu.

Tv was estimated upscaling the sap flow rate measured via Sap Flow sensors (SFM1, ICT
International, Armidale, NSW, Australia; 3 sensors, 1 sensor per plant). ETu was assessed with 3
transparent soil-ground-flux-chambers and a multiplexer (Li-8100 Licor Biosciences, Lincoln, NE,
USA) in 6 campaigns of 72 hours each, with the chambers being moved to a new position every 24
hours to cover time and spatial variability. Ev was assessed by means of three leaf wetness sensors
placed within grapevine canopy. All the measurements were set at 30-minutes intervals, to match
the frequency of ETec.

Preliminary results of this ongoing project, which forsees two years of field measurements,
showed that ETec amounted to 545 mm during the growing season 2021, with values ranging from
0.33 to 4.83 mm d-1. ETec correlated well with net radiation and with ETu. All sap flow sensors
showed a similar trend across the season, consistent with ETec, but differed among each other in
terms of flow quantities, likely due to wood specificities of each sampled grapevine which will
require specific on-site calibrations.

Ev component, rarely considered in ET partitioning studies, was strongly dependent on

precipitation pattern and we hypothesize it can offer a gain of more than 5% in explaining the ET
dynamics in the experimental vineyard, wether compared to removing wet canopy moments from
 the dataset.

Once the calibration of the soil-ground-flux-chambers system and the installed sap-flow sensor be
improved, in-situ measurements of components of ETEPA will contribute to a computational
partitioning approach which improves the comprehension of the dynamics of the ecosystem ET
sources under climate change.

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