VISCA: a smart climate application for Vineyards kicks off in May 2017

VISCA: a smart climate application for Vineyards kicks off in May 2017

Climate change is threatening different varieties of agriculture species; the wine-grapes are especially sensitive to subtle differences in micro-climate impacts causing changes in the crops (i.e. decrease of the grape quality and quantity, changes in alcohol, acid, sugar, etc.) which directly affects the European wine industry.

VISCA (“Vineyards´ Integrated Smart Climate Application”) is a new R&D project co-funded under the Horizon 2020 programme for a period of 3 years. The project holds its kick-off meeting on May 10^th-11^th 2017 in Sant Sadurní d'Anoia, Spain. VISCA consortium is led by Meteosim and is composed of 11 members from different fields including end-users (Codorniu, Mastroberardino and Symington).

VISCA will provide a Climate Service (CS) and Decision Support System (DSS) that integrates climate, agricultural and end-users´ specifications in order to design medium- and long-term adaptation strategies to climate change. The project will be validated by real demonstrations with end-users, who are included in the consortium, on three demo sites in Spain, Italy and Portugal.

More information about Visca Project: 

The main objective of VISCA is the integration of climatic and phenological data supplied by 3 demo core groups into a DSS tool - co-designed with relevant South-European wine companies - capable of supplying well-founded decisions for an appropriate crop planning (i.e. prunning, ripening, harvesting, fertilization, pest-control, etc.), with the ultimate goal of making the wine production industry resilient to effects due to climate change. The objectives to be achieved:

1. Development of a tool that supplies climate-informed decisions to the wine industry

2. Demonstration of the strategic adaptation decisions supplied by this tool in 3 areas where wine business is most sensitive to climate change (Spain, Italy and Portugal)

3. Definition of an action plan to tackle barriers and opportunities derived from the full deployment of VISCA on the 3 demo areas.

 4. Evaluation of the replicability potential in other relevant sectors (forestry, food security, etc.) at international level