High-resolution geomatics tools

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by all United Nations Member States in 2015, provides a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future. At its heart are the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which are an urgent call for action by all countries - developed and developing - in a global partnership. They recognize that ending poverty and other deprivations must go together with strategies that improve health and education, reduce inequality, and spur economic growth – all while tackling climate change and working to preserve our oceans and forests.

Since more than 20 years, Geographical Information Systems (GIS) have been proposed as an advanced tool for the management of variability in commercial vineyards, gaining a high-spatial resolution perspective on crop performance distribution and its underpinning reasons.

The evolution of open-source GIS software suites has democratized access and provided an easy and cheap way for vineyard managers to use a management tool that at the same time allows for a «big picture» view of even large vineyard areas and the possibility to zoom in at the scale of the individual plant, while making it possible to represent diverse georeferenced datasets and perform combined and complex calculations using their data.

The increasing availability of new sets of climate, soil, water, ecosystem and biodiversity data and features from an ever-growing number of sources across the world, is contributing for the capacity to integrate management of commercial vineyards with conservation of surrounding ecosystems and protection of communities making geomatic technology an essential tool to measure and manage contribution for sustainable development.

In our study, we demonstrate the use of geomatic technologies in the management of a commercial vineyard by combining traditional management blocks with segmentation of soil, water availability and flows, erosion, ecological infrastructures and ecosystem features, together with the practical application of those tools to designing drainage networks in slopes, managing and measuring non-crop areas for climate mitigation and nature conservation.

We propose those technologies are a major asset in helping farmers to define, decide and assess their contribution for the SDGs, namely in terms of Responsible Production and Consumption (Goal 12), Climate Action (Goal 13) and Protection of Life on Land (Goal 15).