The escalating impacts of climate change, characterized by rising average temperatures and erratic precipitation patterns, pose a significant threat to Mediterranean-climate ecosystems and high-revenue agricultural products. Among these, the Italian white truffle (Tuber magnatum Picco) represents one of the most economically valuable yet vulnerable species, with market prices reaching €4600 kg−1 in 2025. Due to the persistent challenges in large-scale domestication and its reliance on specific wild habitats, the sustainability of T. magnatum production is increasingly jeopardized by prolonged droughts. This study presents a field-based case study conducted in a natural truffière in central Italy, aimed at evaluating the effects of climatic stressors and exploring the potential role of irrigation as an adaptive management strategy. A small-scale irrigation experiment was implemented over a single growing season using a Before–After–Control–Impact framework, combined with soil moisture modelling and T. magnatum DNA amount monitoring. The results indicate that supplemental irrigation can mitigate summer soil water deficits and reduce the decline in T. magnatum DNA under drought conditions. However, given the limited spatial and temporal scale of the experiment and the limited number of ascocarps collected during the study period, these findings should be considered preliminary. Overall, this study provides initial evidence that targeted irrigation may represent a promising approach to support the resilience of natural truffières under climate variability while highlighting the need for long-term and larger-scale investigations to validate its effectiveness.
Salerni et al. (Mon,) studied this question.