| Summary: | The question of the environmental balance in an agricultural environment is an old issue. The programmes for the replanting of the bocage hedgerows in the West of France started in the 1980s focused on the issue of biodiversity without clearly stating it as such. The wine-growing sector has recently started to specifically address this question. Several factors have influenced such an approach such as the general trend towards the requirement of traceability in food products, evidence of pollution in wine-growing soils and of pesticides in wines, the development of tourism in vineyards and the promotion of landscapes. Embodying this initiative, the European BioDivine programme gradually incorporated landscape issues in the scientific study of biodiversity. Biodiversity and landscape were in this instance associated in technical agricultural approaches (the quality and life of the soils, the hosting of auxiliary animal life, etc.) with less controlled development approaches (the physical transformation of open landscapes through a combination of plantations selected according to their ecological qualities, the development of sites for ecological tourism, etc.). Three countries (France, Spain and Portugal) took part and the wine-growing sectors in each of these countries reacted differently according to their specific aspects and their understanding of the landscape.
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