The preliminary results regarding the case study of Italian pilots within the SWAMP project were presented at INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON PRECISION MANAGEMENT OF ORCHARDS AND VINEYARDS (http://www.pmov2019.it/) in Palermo, Italy, from 7 to 11 October 2019.
180 people from 40 countries took part at the Symposium therefore it was a good opportunity to give additional visibility to the project and present the first results obtained.
The poster, Assessment of Leaf Area Index in Orchards and Vineyards at Different Spatial and Temporal Scales, was presented by Vincenzo Alagna (https://www.unibo.it/sitoweb/v.alagna) on Oct 8th in a session called Mapping and Decision Support Platforms/Systems.
The study investigates the use of three different approaches to assess the spatial temporal variability both in Orchards and Vineyards of the Leaf Area Index (LAI) which represents input data to predict the precision irrigation requirements. LAI estimations were conducted with the optical instrument AccuPAR LP 80 ceptometer on the ground and with proximal sensing from a drone equipped with a multi-spectral camera RedEdge M. In this way plant health indices, as NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) were generated and finally compared at a large scale, with the NDVI obtained from remote sensing retrievals as Sentinel 2-A.
The aim of the present work is closely related with the objective of the Symposium that is to share interdisciplinary knowledge about the implementation and application of both remote and on-site sensing systems for a precise management of Orchards and Vineyards with particular references to the most relevant field operations, such as irrigation, nutrition, pest control, pruning, harvesting, and soil management.
The next Symposium will be done within 3–4 years in Australia to discuss the advancements of the research and ideas on precision agriculture.