Symington Family Estates in Pinhão hosted on May 12, 2023, a workshop to present to the local community the innovative vineyard management developed under the framework of the VitiGEOSS project. The platform aims to provide viticulturists and wine companies’ R&D managers with forecasts, estimations, and recommendations to boost vineyards’ sustainability and adaptation to climate change.
During the event “Serviços de viticultura de precisão para uma gestão mais sustentável da vinha” the different services integrated within the VitiGEOSS platform were presented, comprising a wide range of digital decision-support services for viticulture, including weather, sub-seasonal and seasonal climate predictions, a service that offers monitoring and forecasting of vineyards’ phenology, irrigation calculations, and disease management, as well as business and sustainability tools to reduce exploitation costs and the environmental impact of operations in the wine sector.
Viticulturists and agents of the wine sector involved in innovation activities for the digitization of the sector in Portugal also participated in the workshop. A panel of speakers constituted by Raul Morais and João Santos, professors at UTAD, Rui Soares from the association ProDOURO and Leonor Pereira from the ADVID cluster shared their experiences and latest projects on viticulture 4.0 and the use of satellite data and sensors placed in the fields for gathering useful insight for decision-making during the growing and harvesting season.
The workshop also focused on identifying technological needs, barriers and challenges to overcome for the adoption of decision-support services in the viticulture sector with other service providers in the country like Whereness, Spin.Works and Geodouro.
Funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program, the VitiGEOSS project has created a one-stop-shop for the viticulture sector. The VitiGEOSS application offers a user-friendly visualisation tool with increased resolution and reliability of information from different sources addressed to support specific wine-business operations.
The intelligent services offered combine the Internet of Things, Earth Observation services, sensors, mathematics, and Artificial Intelligence to provide winemakers with complete information about climate, phenology, plant physiology, and disease forecasts, as well as management recommendations for their business operations.
Responding to important challenges in the wine industry such as mitigating the effects of climate change and moving towards more sustainable production, the solution has been validated at three demo sites in Italy, Portugal, and Spain with regional leading wine producers. The pilots have served to calibrate and test the models and services included in the platform.
The VitiGEOSS consortium is made up of nine partners from Spain, Italy, Portugal and the Netherlands, including three research and technology organisations (Eurecat Technology Center, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and LINKS Foundation, a university (the University of Naples Federico II), an SME (eLEAF), a consultancy firm (PwC) and three wineries (Familia Torres, Symington and Mastroberardino).
