A user friendly Decision Support System for an integrated vineyard management

The Vintage project* The Vintage project aims to provide final users with a low cost and easy to use web based integrated management solution in order to support wine producers throughout the vineyard life cycle, from planting to harvesting. The main innovation of the Vintage approach is represented by the scope to make available timely retrieved temporal and spatial precision information on vineyards, which can give the possibility to apply at the right moment the best cultural practices (irrigation, canopy management, disease control, etc…). * The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme managed by REA - Research Executive Agency, FP7/ under Grant Agreement no

Four relevant European Associations of wine producers, have decided to endorse the Vintage project in order to support their associates for increasing their competitiveness and to regain a pivotal role at worldwide level. “Wine is a cultural and economic asset for Europe and, therefore, a product upon which European countries have built their own fortunes”. However, in the last years, New World producers (mostly South Africa, Australasia and South America) are taking advantage of several compelling market trends, attacking the European leadership in this sector. Market needs

VINTAGE Objectives The VINTAGE system will be run at wine growers association level and based on continuous vineyard monitoring, with the aim to improve their productivity and to optimise the use of resources (irrigation water, fertilizers, pesticides, manpower). The systems will allow the users to: address quality and production variability issues increase efficiency to overcome the fragmentary management of the consortia of wine producers boost the new marketing functions of the user, giving them maps, graphs, images and reports of the productions Information for the vineyard management: State and conditions of the vineyard Ripeness and quality of grapes Soil humidity and weather conditions Other parameters: fertilizing and irrigation soil and climatic variability zone at risk of fungi or parasites attack

devote different areas in the same vineyard to different quality productions apply spatially-variable management to even out yield and grape variability react to variability by managing zones differently and segregating fruit at harvest for unique character “reserve” wines timely discover anomalies, obtained by the continuous parameter estimation timely react to weather and climate change related issues Vintage project will make available to the Associations and SMEs involved an innovative management platform (including both SW and HW components) able to provide novel Precision Viticulture Services to own associated members and new clients, which will be able to: The Vintage Benefits

Vintage mission statement is to innovate through the integration of mature experiences made of wireless meteorological and soil monitoring, phenological, phytosanitary and hydro- pedological modelling as well as vineyard variability assessment and management. Combining these technologies and methodologies, the Vintage system will allow vine growers to improve and optimise production systems by taking into account technical and economical aspects of management as well as environmental issues. The Vintage Mission

Electronic design and assembling of the Wireless Monitoring Stations. Implementation of Decision Support System on top of the new models and coordination of the System Integration. Extension of the CRITERIA3D model with satellite and in- field information to realise the new VINTAGE model suite. Developing phytosanitary analysis algorithms, zoning methods for climate data spatialization and climate zoning for viticulture. Implementation of the algorithms for the monitoring of vineyards and elaboration of geo-referenced prescription map. Integration of satellite images with ground sensors. Identification of the best suited satellite images and datasets for vineyard monitoring; their downscaling and parameterisation on the basis of the ground data and high resolution DEM. Validation of methodology for vineyard cadastre development. Implementation of ergonomic HMIs, highly flexible in terms of presentation views, data formats, presented data volumes, etc. based on vineyard cadastre. Who is developing the VINTAGE platform?

Concept idea of Vintage system was proposed and developed in collaboration with GAIAG: an ICT company with expertises focused on satellite data exploitation in precision agriculture. Vintage system will be owned by the SME-AGs but they will need support to manage it from the point of view of System Administration at the end of the project. For this reason, the maintenance services and potential upgrades will be provided by GAIAG or its licensees which will act as service and technology provider in the reference market. Who will take care of the maintenance of the Vintage system? Who will test and validate the Vintage system during the project? The Vintage project foresees the implementation of one Pilot for each target area of the four Associations involved in order to deploy the system as well as test and validate its technical functionalities and performance in the real application field. One of these pilots will be performed through Bodegas del Medievo partner in La Rioja region: a Spanish winery devoted to the production of high quality DOC wines adopting innovative techniques and modern facilities.

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Full Title: An User friendly Decision Support System for an integrated vineyard management, for addressing quality and quantity production variability optimising the use of resources Funding Scheme: FP7–SME Research for SMEs associations Grant Agreement n°: Starting Date: 01/12/2011 Project Duration: 36 Months Consortium: 12 Partners coming from 5 Countries (4 SMEs associations, 2 SMEs and 6 RTDPs ) VINTAGE Project ID