Growing up in Colorado for most of my life, I saw firsthand the devastation brought by the drought of the early 2000s. This included damaged crops and the destruction of many farmers’ livelihoods. I moved to NYC, not only to teach about the environment, but also to pursue a career that would contribute to food security. Currently, I am studying remote sensing as a way to monitor crops. The goal of my work is to find ways to mitigate the impact of these extreme events on our food supply by finding better ways to use satellite remote sensing — whether it be for improving irrigation or figuring out better harvesting times for quality food.

Project

Vineyards require precise irrigation and canopy management to produce a quality grape for winemaking. Attempts to improve management strategies with satellite remote sensing have been met with limited successes, providing limited information on vineyard health and status. Improving monitoring efforts can support a multi-billion-dollar industry that directly impacts local economies through wine tourism and job creation.

Currently, we are developing a methodology for improved vineyard monitoring that integrates multiple satellite datasets to measure different characteristics of grapevines. These measurements will be validated by ground data collected from Long Island, NY from 2017 and 2018. Our goal is to develop a cost-effective monitoring tool for vineyard managers that identifies grapevine conditions, such as grapevine development and field uniformity. This offers the potential to enhance the ability to optimize management practices for winemaking.

Vineyards and the health of their grapes are sensitive to their local climate. Local conditions in combination with wine grape development creates a situation where vineyards are dynamic field-to-field and through time. Precise management strategies are needed to produce quality wine, where water application and grapevine growth need to be precisely controlled. This leaves little room for error during the growing season. Unfortunately, this precise control will be more difficult to manage as climate change is expected to impact and disrupt vineyard regions. This includes major disruptions and possible loss of all vineyards in California due to shifting freshwater availability. Cooler climate regions, like New York, may see increased wine production due to more favorable conditions for growing grapes. In all, climate change will affect the local economics of a region dependent on vineyard production and tourism. 

As a result, vineyard managers are identifying ways to improve vineyard monitoring strategies that mitigates the impact of climate and maintain wine production. This includes improved irrigation timing to appropriately stress the grapevines, and vine maintenance for optimum leaf-to-grape balance that ensures the appropriate concentration of flavors and sugars at harvest. Radar and optical/IR remote sensing satellites have shown their utility for agriculture monitoring, informing farmers on crop health, growth, and potential yield. However, a challenge remains: how to optimally utilize combined datasets from satellites to inform on vineyard management for wine production. 

These challenges and needs tie into my dissertation project: to develop a methodology that integrates multiple satellite datasets to improve vineyard monitoring. The goal is to produce a product that provides meaningful information to vineyard managers; it could be a map that describes grapevine field uniformity, which shows how similar or different the grapevines are to each other. This is important to know, as you want grapevines to develop similarly so they produce similar quality grapes. Accomplishing this goal requires a significant amount of ground data to verify the accuracy of what the satellite was measuring in the vineyard field. 

The Provost’s Pre-Dissertation Summer Science Research Grant provided me with the opportunity to collect ground data to verify accuracy. Starting on June 1, 2018 and continuing until harvest, ground data was collected at a vineyard on the North Fork of Long Island. I selected two varietals: Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon, popular choices for wine consumers. The dates of ground data collection coincided with when the European Space Agency (ESA) Sentinel-1A synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite flew over the vineyard. This was purposeful, to link ground data to satellite data to better understand what Sentinel-1A was “seeing” as it was passing over the vineyard fields. 

Preliminary results show that Sentinel-1A is tracking grapevine growth throughout the growing season, as verified by ground data. Next steps include tracking and mapping grapevine uniformity within fields and by varietal. This information and relationship between ground data and satellite remote sensing will be useful in developing a cost-effective precision monitoring tool for vineyard growers to better manage their grapevines for winemaking.