Use of Remotely Sensed Data for the Evaluation of Inter-Row Cover Intensity in Vineyards

Information on vegetation cover and soil management is used in hydrological and soil erosion modeling, but in most cases, reference values are used solely based on land use classificationwithout considering the actual spatial and temporal variation adopted at the field scale. This workfocused on the adoption of satellite optical data from the Copernicus Sentinel-2 (S2) mission toevaluate both spatial and temporal variations of vineyard ground cover. First, on a wider scale, fieldswere mapped by photointerpretation, and a cluster analysis was carried out. Results suggest thatvineyards can be classified according to different inter-row soil management, with the best resultsobtained using NDVI and NDWI. A pilot area in the municipality of Carpeneto, in the wine-growingarea of Alto Monferrato, was also analyzed due to the availability of reference data on inter-rowvegetation cover from experimental plots. Those are set on sloping areas and present differentinter-row soil managements (conventional tillage--CT, and permanent grass cover--GC). Time seriesof different vegetation indices (VIs) have been obtained, and both S2 native bands and the derivedVIs were evaluated to assess their capability of describing the vineyard's inter-row coverage growthtrends at plot level for the agrarian year 2017-2018. Results suggest that a seasonality effect maybe involved in the choice of the most suitable band or index that better describes soil coveragedevelopment at a given moment of the year. Further studies on open-source remotely sensed (RS)data could provide specific inputs for applications in erosion risk management and crop modeling.