Abstract
The knowledge at site level of meteorological and environmental variables involved in vine vegetative development and in grape maturation process is not enough to perceive the plant behaviour in a heterogeneous agro-system such as a vineyard. A useful support for winegrowers decision-making arises from the use of crop growth models able to simulate physiological processes that occur in the atmosphere-plant-soil interface. The study was conducted, during the 2016 and 2017 season, in a Nebbiolo vineyard equipped with ‘above’ and ‘below’ the canopy meteorological sensors. Meteorological measures, soil characteristics and vineyards features were used as input of the VICMOTO model developed to simulate phenological phases, leaf area and grape yield development, water available for the plant in the soil vine water status and berry sugar accumulation. Specific field surveys were used to calibrate and validate the numerical model. VICMOTO showed quite good performance in simulating phenological phases, sugar accumulation and yield, while vine leaf area and soil water potential are less accurate. The calibration and validation of VICMOTO requires measurements to be carried out on different sites and years. In order to obtain a better agreement between simulations and measures, it might be appropriate to modify the parameters and algorithms related to vegetative development and soil water potential.
Highlights
Vine growth, ripening evolution, health and quality of grapes are all hugely affected by meteorological and environmental variables which, play a key role in influencing management decisions of winegrowers [1, 2]
A crop growth model able to simulate physiological and phenological vine responses to meteo-environmental forcing has been developed as a smart winegrower/agronomist-oriented IT tool on the basis of existing scientific models [3, 4, 5]
A comparison between the data simulated by the model and the data collected during field survey was performed in order to evaluate model accuracy and discuss any critical issues and further improvements to the algorithms
Summary
Vine growth, ripening evolution, health and quality of grapes are all hugely affected by meteorological (i.e. solar radiation, temperature, relative humidity, rainfall, wind) and environmental variables (site and soil features) which, play a key role in influencing management decisions of winegrowers [1, 2].The aim of the project was to develop a crop numerical model able to simulate, after proper validation and calibration, some vine responses useful to the growers for managing the vineyard practices.
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