From soil to canopy, the diversity of adaptation strategies  to abiotic constraints in grapevine

The Muscadet area is situated in the southeast of Nantes, close to the Atlantic coast. It constitutes the western extension of the French vineyard “Loire Valley”. The Muscadet is renowned and often spontaneously linked to a white wine. However it remains misconceived as an ordinary wine, lacking authenticity.

Agriculture plantations are complex systems whose performance critically depends on the execution of several types of tasks with precise timing and efficiency to respond to different external factors. This is particularly true for orchards like vineyards, which need to be strictly monitored and regulated, as they are sensitive to diverse types of pests, and climate conditions. In these environments, managing and optimally scheduling the available work force and resources is not trivial and is usually done by teams of senior managers based on their experience. In this regard, having a baseline schedule could help them in the decision process and improve their results, in terms of time and resources spent.

The past three decades of terrestrial remote sensing research have delivered unprecedented insights into our fundamental ability to detect, quantify, and differentiate plant disease (Gold 2021). However, much of our fundamental knowledge in this domain has come from studies in non-agricultural systems and until recently, most agricultural studies, when extant, have focused on tree crops where canopy closure and large plot and plant size facilitate stress detection at low spatial resolution. Recent engineering innovations and advancements in constellation architecture design have refined the accuracy and scalability of airborne and spaceborne sensing platforms, enabling us to monitor diverse specialty crops, including grapevine, planted in smaller, spatially varied fields.

For wine areas around the world, nature and climate are becoming factors of production whose endowment becomes a stake beyond the traditional economic factors: labor, capital, land. They strongly influence agricultural and environmental conditions for production.

Downy and powdery mildew are major issues in grapevine cultivation, requiring many phytosanitary treatments to ensure yield and quality. Climatic changes are also challenging grape cultivation