Yesterday we were part of the “Awarding Ceremony” of the contest “ CHALLENGES FOR POST-FIRE RECOVERY” that the Ministry of Science, Technology, Knowledge and Innovation (MinCiencia) together with the National Agency for Research and Development (ANID) developed to support the regions of Ñuble, Biobío and La Araucanía affected by severe fires in the summer of 2023.

12 projects were selected within the 3 proposed challenges: (1) information for forest fire risk management; (2) effects of forest fires on ecosystems; and (3) consequences of forest fires in the territories. Particularly in Challenge 3, UC Davis Chile together with a team of researchers from the School of Pharmacy of the Universidad de Concepción and the Department of Viticulture and Enology of UC Davis, will develop a predictive sensory chemistry tool that will evaluate the impact of wildfire smoke on grapes and wine. This tool will integrate chemical and sensory analysis to provide growers with accurate and early information. It will enable informed decision making, mitigating economic losses associated with the depreciation of wine quality affected by smoke, thus promoting resilience and sustainability in the wine industry.

We will be advised by leading chilean institutions and experts from Chile and California: Dr. Larry Lerno, Research Director of the UC Davis Food Safety and Measurement Center; Dr. Arran Rumbaugh, Research Chemist at the USDA Agricultural Research Service in Davis, CA; Annegret Cantu, M Sc, head of the sensory evaluation laboratory of the Department of Enology and Viticulture at UC Davis; Dr. Felipe Laurie Gleisner, M.D., Ph. Felipe Laurie Gleisner, Associate Professor with a background in Food Science and Viticulture, outstanding researcher in chemistry and wine production at the Universidad de Talca; Roberto Henríquez, renowned Agricultural Engineer and Winemaker; Asociación Gremial de Enólogos y Profesionales del Vino del Valle del Itata (AGEPVVI), presided by winemaker Edgardo Candia; the Asociación de Viñateros del Valle del Itata AG represented by Victor Castellón Campos and the Instituto de Desarrollo Agropecuario (INDAP).

Jimena Balic, Coordinator of Viticulture and Enology at UC Davis Chile and Director of this project pointed out that “forest fires and controlled burns expose vineyards and grapes to smoke, affecting the quality of the wine and causing damage to the reputation of the products and economic losses to producers in the Itata Valley”.

For the Undersecretary of the Ministry of Science, Carolina Gainza, initiatives like these, make visible the country's capacity for research, for generating applicable knowledge for the prevention of forest fires, their control, analysis from different variables of the phenomenon, and also for post-fire recovery. “All the work we did in the regions, with the researchers and the people affected, was materialized in this contest. We made available the research done in the country for these socio-environmental disasters. I congratulate those 12 projects. who were awarded, they will contribute to research and to the public policies that we can develop to prevent and manage socio-environmental disasters”, he remarked.

Alejandra Pizarro, national director of ANID, highlighted the work done by the teams in generating this special competition: “As a team, we could take this public policy and this invitation from the Ministry to build an instrument and implement it so that it could be applied. We also did it with COVID-19 a few years ago when we also made available some instruments that allowed us to do research. Today we can see that our scientific community had the capacity, the energy, and the creative and innovative process to generate good proposals that the Committee evaluated and today we are getting to know”, he said.