Data, Imagery, and Analytics to Inform Agriculture
We provide several types of agricultural data to assist the grower with vineyard management throughout the year. Our data services improve your understanding of current and future vineyard conditions, providing you with the information needed to make timely decisions on canopy management and irrigation that optimize yields and quality during any given year.
Support Services
We need data about your vineyard blocks to set up and initialize a soil water balance model. These data include:
- Irrigation to date (from flowmeters)
- Soils (from the USDA county database or sampled locally)
- Vineyard block boundary file (shapefile or kml file)
Our support services are aimed at improving the accuracy of your vineyard input datasets, thereby improving the accuracy of the model water stress and irrigation forecasts. We can provide you with low-cost, cellular-enabled flowmeters that measure daily irrigation and report these data to the web for you to access from your desk. You can use these data to accurately document vineyard water use and to see how much water is actually going on to each of your blocks. We can also sample soils across your vineyard, thereby improving on the accuracy of the USDA county-level surveys. And we can build a block boundary file (shapefile) that we use to summarize these datasets by block across your vineyard.
Water Stress and Irrigation Forecasts
We utilize a soil water-balance model to combine NDVI imagery measurements of canopy growth with local soils, weather (historical and forecast), and block and irrigation data to track vine growth, water use, water stress, and irrigation needs over the growing season for each block.Along with the NDVI imagery, the weekly forecasts include:
- Summary weather and forecast metrics
- Summaries of irrigation, soil moisture, water stress, and vine size by block
- Forecast of irrigation needs through the end of the upcoming week by block
- Trends over the season, and relative to last year, by block
You define your seasonal vine water stress targets for each block. When calculated vine water stress exceeds your predefined target, we calculate the amount of irrigation necessary to reduce water stress back to your target, and provide this recommendation to you in the weekly forecast. During the 1st year, we calibrate the our model for each block using your leaf water potential data (by adjusting the rooting depth parameter). Once calibrated, LWP measurements are only occasionally required to check the calibration, letting you save on labor costs by allocating those resources to other blocks.
Contact
Contact Lars Pierce for more information.