🌱 Drought Research at Yvorne 2050 (Dry50)
What happens to vineyard soil life when drought becomes the norm?
DRY50 is a field experiment running at Yvorne (Switzerland) investigating the impact of future drought scenarios on vineyard ecosystems. Under tunnel structures mimicking historical, 2085, and extreme drought conditions, we are tracking how soil microbial communities (protists, fungi, and bacteria) respond to water stress in Chasselas vineyards.
Using state-of-the-art metabarcoding across three molecular markers (18S rRNA, ITS2, 16S rRNA), we are characterising over 35,000 amplicon sequence variants from 128 soil samples, building one of the most comprehensive pictures of vineyard soil biodiversity to date.
The bioinformatic pipeline, from raw sequencing reads to annotated community matrices, is fully reproducible and will be openly available on GitHub. Statistical analyses are now underway.
A collaboration between HES-SO Changins, Agroscope, and the University of Fribourg and Neuchâtel (2023–2027).