BSC participates in the European project VitiGEOSS, which aims to deploy innovative vineyard tools to support the sustainable management of the vineyard, offering integrated services for weather and climate predictions, crop and disease management, business operations and sustainability assessment.
The project is coordinated by the technological center Eurecat and makes use of artificial intelligence techniques for the analysis, optimisation and integration of multiple data sources that allow the development of services, with the aim to improve the local management of agricultural business operations at the economic and environmental level.
The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) participates, together with the technological center Eurecat in the European consortium VitiGEOSS, which is developing an innovative vineyard management platform that provides forecasts, estimations and recommendations for wine makers to help boost vineyards’ sustainability and adaptation to climate change.
Based on open-access satellite imagery and derived products and climate data from the European Copernicus Programme, together with other sources of data like drone and fixed camera images or in-field and machinery data, VitiGEOSS is developing intelligent services delivering weather and climate predictions, recommendations for crop and disease management, and tools for the management of business operations and sustainability of the vineyard.
BSC will oversee the co-design of the intelligent service for the delivery of weather and climate predictions together with the wineries Torres, Symington and Mastroberardino. This intelligent service will be integrated in the project innovative platform and will provide forecasts for the next days, weeks and months, useful for the management of the vineyard. BSC will also be responsible for the dissemination of the project results and will participate in the organization of webinars and participatory workshops targeting the wine and data collection sectors as well as potential service providers with the aim of spreading the use of earth observation and climate services.
Funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 program, the VitiGEOSS project builds on existing solutions like FieldLook and VISCA, creating a one-stop-shop for the viticulture sector. The VitiGEOSS application will offer a common user-friendly visualisation tool with increased resolution and reliability of information from different sources addressed to support specific wine-business operations.
To this end, "we will advance agronomic prescription by developing an ecosystem of services for the vineyard sector to support farmers and producers, optimise sustainable vine cultivation via decision support systems on weather and climate forecasting, phenology, disease and business operations, and by extension, making the most of open European data and resources" explains Rosa Araujo, VitiGEOSS Project Coordinator and Project Manager at Eurecat Technology Center.
“We are validating the potential of Earth Observation services and Artificial Intelligence to promote a better management and planning of fields and vineyards, as well as the optimisation of innovative agricultural practices”, states the director of the Eurecat Applied Artificial Intelligence Unit, Xavier Domingo. “The use of open resources such as Earth observation services can improve the efficiency of vineyards thanks to accurate mapping, novel production indicators, image and time series processing and an accurate and improved forecast” he adds.
The European Union is currently the world’s largest producer of wine, and its production is the main economic activity in many areas of southern Europe. In this sense, the innovation promoted by VitiGEOSS aims to respond to the future challenges of the wine industry, intensifying production in a sustainable way and, at the same time, mitigating the effects of climate change by reducing negative environmental externalities and promoting local economic growth. The VitiGEOSS services developed will be tested, calibrated and validated in demo sites of three major wine producers in Spain, Italy and Portugal.
The VitiGEOSS consortium is made up of 9 partners from Spain, Italy, Portugal and the Netherlands, including three research and technology organisations (Eurecat Technology Center, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and Fundazione Links), a university (the University of Naples Federico II), an SME (ELEAF), a consultancy firm (PwC) and three wineries (Familia Torres, Symington and Mastroberardino).
- Key project data
Full Project Title: Vineyard Innovative Tool based on the InteGration of Earth Observation Services and in-field Sensors
Project Acronym: VITIGEOSS
Start: 1 September 2020
Duration: 42 months
Budget: 3,025,557.50€
Coordinator: Eurecat Technology Center