Smart and Sustainable Drone-assisted Viticulture Excellence Network

Viticulture worldwide faces a dual challenge: the effects of the Climate Change (CC) and the preparation of vine growers to employ new technological solutions to face the upcoming changes and emerging needs. Interactions between plant resistance traits and abiotic stress tolerance may represent the most substantial impact of climate change on plant productivity. What’s more, a study of Eurostat reveals that 67% of the pesticides in Europe are used in viticulture. This is where SmartVitiNet comes in, to offer solutions for precision viticulture that can be an alternative, ensuring continued crop health monitoring, timely and targeted interventions.

Viticulture faces the challenge of Climate Change (CC) effects and the preparation of vine growers to employ new technological solutions to face these changes and emerging needs.

What is the role of Future Needs?

Future Needs will lead the dissemination and exploitation activities of the SmartVitiNet project and will facilitate the requirements analysis and the architecture design. 

Future Needs’ team is experienced in user experience, service design, communication and business development, thus it is responsible for the dissemination of project achievements  and the establishment of the exploitation strategy for further commercialization of SmartVitiNet project’s results. Furthermore, Future Needs will co-develop the SmartVitiNet Decision Support System (DSS) and will create the definition of the Minimum Viable Product. Finally, it will lead the community piloting in Cyprus.

SmartVitiNet will benefit furthermore by Future Needs’ established knowledge and expertise gained during another equivalent ongoing project run in collaboration with other partners. This is the Oenobotics project (funded under an Open call of the H2020 AgroboFood project) that will provide its results – prototypes developed and datasets – to be scaled up in SmartVitiNet.

Which are the main objectives of SmartVitiNet?

SmartVitiNet project aims at the following four general objectives:

– To create an accessible and affordable integrated solution for viticulture to be used both by vineyard owners themselves and agricultural policy makers. 

-To connect policy makers, academia and technology actors with the viticulture community in a sustainable way with the aim to make innovative technologies accessible for the highest number of wine-growers. In order to improve the existing business ecosystem of the agricultural sector, SmartVitiNet will establish a Competence Centre for precision viticulture. 

-To create more business potential in the area of precision agriculture. 

-To strengthen the competitiveness of national wine producers. It will enhance and build a competitive edge by developing and adopting new and better ways of growing grapes and making wines and especially for less developed regions of the partners’ countries – Greece, Cyprus, Portugal and Spain. 

 

Which are the advantages of precision viticulture?

One of the most powerful tools in precision viticulture is the use of remote sensing through its ability to rapidly provide a synoptic view of grapevine shape, size and vigor over entire vineyards. Its potential for improving viticultural practice is evident by the relationships that are known to exist between these canopy descriptors and grape quality and yield. Sensors are starting to provide literally granular data points on soil conditions, as well as detailed info on wind, fertilizer requirements, water availability and pest infestations, which in addition to aerial images captured by unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) which can patrol fields, can alert vine-growers to crop ripeness or potential problems and provide early warnings of deviations from expected growth rates or quality. Individual plants can be monitored for nutrients and growth rates. Furthermore, the introduction of automation in agriculture has profound impacts on most aspects of farming.

Given that the average area per holding in Cyprus and Greece is 0.55 hectares and in Portugal 0.9 hectares, vineyards of these countries are ideal candidates for drone remote sensing use. In France, there are many bigger vineyards but there is a significant amount of smaller vineyards as well.