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The negative effects of plant protection products on the human health and the environment have become a major concern for consumers and politics in Europe. In the last years new policies for risk mitigation and reduction of use of synthetic pesticides has been enforce in Europe and Switzerland. A possible strategy to reduce the use of plant protection products is to spray according to the epidemic of diseases and pests by following decision support systems (DSS). The platform VitiMeteo offers a wide set of forecasting models for viticulture including downy and powdery mildew, black rot, grape berry moth and rust mite. Two research institutes the Staatliches Weinbauinstitut Freiburg (Germany) and Agroscope (Switzerland) developed VitiMeteo jointly. A consortium was built with the company Geosens (Germany) which is in charge of the programming of the different forecasting software. Each institute is running his own internet website with specific tools and feature for each country but the core of the system is the same. The combination of these different DSS allows a significant reduction of plant protection products used. All these forecasting systems and tools are freely available for the winegrowers on the platform www.vitimeteo.de and www.agrometeo.ch. The use of these platforms helps the winegrowers to meet current society's expectations.

The paper focuses on fluid–structure interactions (FSI) between a turbulent, gusty fluid flow, and a membrane structure. Lightweight structures are particularly vulnerable to wind gusts and can be completely destroyed by them, making it essential to develop and evaluate numerical simulation methods suited for these types of problems. In this study, a thin-walled membrane in the shape of a hyperbolic paraboloid (hypar) is analyzed as a real-scale example. The membrane structure is subjected to discrete wind gusts of varying strength from two different directions. A partitioned FSI approach is employed, utilizing a finite-volume flow solver based on the large-eddy simulation technique and a finite-element solver developed for shell and membrane structures. A recently proposed source-term formulation enables the injection of discrete wind gusts within the fluid domain in front of the structure. In a step-by-step analysis, first the fluid flow around the structure, initially assumed to be rigid, is investigated, including a grid sensitivity analysis. This is followed by examining the two-way coupled FSI system, taking the flexibility of the membrane into account. Finally, the study aims to assess the impact of wind gusts on the resulting deformations and the induced stresses in the tensile material, with a particular focus on the influence of different wind directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]