A Proposed Low-Cost Viticulture Stress Framework for Table Grape Varieties

Abstract

Climate change significantly affects viticulture by reducing the production yield and the quality characteristics of its final products. In some observed cases, the consequences of climate outages such as droughts, hail and floods are absolutely devastating for the farmers and the sustained local economies. Hence, it is essential to develop new in implementation monitoring solutions that offer remote real-time surveillance, alert triggering, minimum maintenance and automated generation of incident alerts with precision responses. This paper presents a new framework and a system for vine stress monitoring called Vity-stress. The Vity-stress framework combines field measurements with precise viticulture suggestions and stress avoidance planning. The key points of the proposed framework’s system are that it is easy to develop, easy to maintain and cheap to implement applicability. Focusing on the Mediterranean cultivated table grape varieties that are strongly affected by climate change, we propose a new stress conditions monitoring system to support our framework. The proposition includes distributed field located sensors and a novel camera module implementing deep neural network algorithms to detect stress indicators. Additionally, a new wireless sensor network supported by the iBeacon protocol has been developed. The results of the sensory measurements’ data logging and imposed image detection process’s evaluation shows that the proposed system can successfully detect different stress levels in vineyards, which in turn can allow producers to identify specific areas for irrigation, thereby saving water, energy and time.