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Major climate changes in recent years has significantly affected the wine production, causing water stress on plants and altering the ripening of the grapes, forcing farmers to take important decisions on irrigation scheduling, defoliation and harvest timing.
Understanding how plants react to these climate change is becoming a relevant information for the production of quality grapes in a severe water stress either due to the lack or to excess of water.
Gaining, therefore, detailed information on some representative plants of the vineyard, may direct the producer to more informed and more effective choices, achieving the highest trade-off between quality and quantity.

The soil moisture sensors placed at different depths are very effective to know how much water is available in the soil and to understand the response of soil to rain or to irrigation.
Although soil moisture sensors are more than sufficient in many kinds of crops , such as vegetables or lawns, "more complex" plants, such as the vines, it may not be enough. For these plants water stress and the demand for water is a function of several parameters: soil moisture, roots' depth, type of rootstock, soil composition, are just some of the factors that may induce or delay plant water stress. For this reason, the VineSense system can also incorporate sensors measuring trunk diameter growth and indirectly control the xylematic flow of the stem, without any invasive operation.

The diametric growth sensor(EsSense), designed by Netsens, is a sensor that can read changes in the stem in the order of thousandths of a millimeter (microns) and allows you to draw a graph of the daily pulse of the plant, due to a greater or lesser inflow of water into the trunk from the ground. The trend is so precise and accurate (accuracy +/- 5 microns) to make the closure of stomata by the plant visible during the hot season.

Just like other living beings in the presence of high temperatures and dry periods, the plant activates defence mechanisms, aimed at lowering tissue temperatures, decreasing the water or in extreme cases to protect itself at the expense of fruits. The implementation of these strategies are clearly visible by comparing the temperature data with the evolution of the diameter of the barrel. An interesting example occurred in the summer of 2009 in Tuscany, when the daily maximum temperature exceeded for 7 consecutive days of 35 ° C (blue graph). The plant has responded to this stressful period with the closure of stomata during the hottest hours, visible in the smaller day-night contractions of the dendrometer ( brown graph), but the water shortage has also led to an overall reduction of the diameter of the barrel.

The EsSense dendrometer is now used by many farms that have adopted the VineSense system; from Italy to Spain to the wilderness of Luxor there are concrete examples of usage of this the sensor in field.
The most interesting example, given the extreme conditions, is certainly the use of EsSense in Egypt, where scorching temperatures are a constant from April to September and there's a daily fight against water stress. With the dendrometer, agronomists in charge of determining irrigation cycles of plants do not need to be every day in field, but they can concentrate their visits in the vineyard once per month, managing the global operations by web. Certainly VineSense is the best way to learn the plant status, since the sensor is placed directly on the plant and acquires data in real time, instantly allowing to verify the correct positioning of the sensor, without any nasty surprise at the end of the season with data losses, as often happens with the datalogger.

Documents
	Evaluation of drought response (598 kB)
	Low temperature induces different cold sensitivity in two poplar clones (736 kB)
	Phytomonitoring Technique for Table Grapes (385 kB)
	Phytomonitoring technique for tuning irrigation of vineyards (246 kB)
	Water Use Strategies in Olive Trees (452 kB)

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