Soils are recognized as one of the most important components characterizing a vineyard. The soil plays an important role in providing the minerals to the plants, but also its characteristics also affect the water status of the vines, which is a key factor determining the grape quality potential. Suitably conserved soils can participate to increase soil stability and biodiversity, which are able to protect the roots against erosion and nutrients losses.

However, the soils of vineyards are among the most degraded ones in comparison to other cultivated lands. Nowadays, human and rainfall impacts are showing common features of land degradation as a result in high soil erosion rates and modification of the natural hydrological and biological processes. These have proven to negatively affect the productivity and quality of the vineyards. However, little is known about the human and rainfall impacts on soil erosion and modification of the natural hydrological and biological processes on the soil at long-term periods at field scale, the economy and the cultural soil management heritage.

That being said, in this session, we want to address the main techniques (GIS, remote sensing, field experiments and procedures, modelling or laboratory analysis...) and results related with these problematic in vineyards. Worldwide researches from soil science, agronomy, geography, hydrology, geomorphology, ecology, oenology or human sciences, as long as they deal with the following topics, are welcome:
i) Controlling factors (natural and anthropogenic): soil tillage practices (machinery, amendments, vegetation covers...), rainfall events, decrease of the biodiversity, soil loss, rill and ephemeral gullies monitoring, nutrient losses...
ii) Economic implications of soil degradation processes on productivity.
iii) Concepts and future prospects related with the state-of-art in soil erosion, hydrological processes and biological alterations in vineyards. The question is: what is the next step?

Finally, we hope to develop in this session an interesting and constructive debate, which allows to improve the future prospective (theoretical and practical) of scientific community related to vineyard researches, being this knowledge also useful for the society.