Optimising vineyard management with a one-stop-shop of intelligent services
The EU is the world’s leading wine producer and viticulture is the largest EU agri-food sector in terms of exports. The increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events threatens this and other agricultural sectors. The EU-funded VITIGEOSS project has delivered an easy-to-use platform of digital services to help vineyards increase their resilience while operating more sustainably to meet current and future needs. The easily accessible, reliable and real-time information integrating higher-resolution and more reliable satellite data with other data streams will support decision making and precision agriculture.
Multiple data inputs, multiple intelligent outputs
The VitiGEOSS platform integrates data from Earth observation satellites, weather stations, climate models, fixed cameras, drones, in-field sensors and end-user information. These are used in essential services for vineyard management: weather and climate forecasts, phenological monitoring, drone vineyard monitoring, crop status indication/disease forecasting and management, and business and sustainability support. According to VITIGEOSS coordinator Rosa M. Araujo Rivero of Eurecat Technology Centre: “By providing wine producers with location-specific and field-specific information in one place, the VitiGEOSS platform enables efficient management and optimisation of vineyard operations, leading to cost savings and sustainable practices. Furthermore, researchers can explore advanced solutions for vineyard management leading to, for example, reduced chemical use and enhanced resource optimisation.”
A one-stop-shop for the viticulture sector
The weather and climate forecasts provide data on variables like temperature, precipitation, and radiation on three time scales: short-term (the next three days), sub-seasonal (the next four weeks), and seasonal (the next three months). The phenological monitoring and forecast service monitors and predicts the onset of key growth stages of the grapevine relative to seasonal changes and climate. Drone vineyard monitoring uses a computer vision model to analyse vineyard images captured by drones. It delineates individual vineyard rows and computes crucial vegetation indices for grapevines and inter-row areas. Presented as coloured heatmaps, the indices allow viticulturists to visualise the health of their vines at a glance. Crop status monitoring keeps an eye on key crop indicators of health including biomass production, crop water demand, evapotranspiration, the normalised difference vegetation index and nitrogen levels. Diseases forecasting and management provides infection alerts for downy mildew and powdery mildew as well as risk levels of infection. This can minimise crop losses due to pathogens, minimise the use of fungicides and generally reduce the use of chemicals. Finally, the business and sustainability service is a schedule optimiser tool designed to facilitate, accelerate and optimise the planning and resource management associated with vineyard tasks. This can help minimise costs and reduce the environmental impact of tasks by reducing fuel use or optimising fungicide application.
More efficient and sustainable agriculture
The intelligent services were piloted in three vineyards in Spain, Italy, and Portugal. End-user Symington Family Estates in Portugal underscores that, “the climate and social changes that the agricultural sector will face in the future will impose enormous challenges on farmers. Technologies like the VitiGEOSS platform that can be used to create value and help make agriculture more efficient and sustainable are certainly a great asset.” Interested parties in European and other countries can request a demo account for the VITIGEOSS services by contacting the project at info@vitigeoss.eu. “By successfully increasing the resolution and reliability of satellite information applied to viticulture, the VITIGEOSS project has not only met its goals but revealed valuable insights and delivered tools that contribute to sustainable vineyard management and climate resilience,” concludes Araujo Rivero. VITIGEOSS is helping the EU’s wine producing sector accelerate its Agriculture 4.0 transition to ensure high-quality wine on EU tables and viticulture’s essential contribution to the EU economy.
Keywords
VITIGEOSS, vineyard, climate, agriculture, viticulture, vineyard management, vineyards, climate forecasts, climate resilience, phenological monitoring
