High-resolution geomatics tools: Sustainably managing commercial vineyards to address the UN SDGs

Abstract

The UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development provides a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet. Consisting of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), it calls for action in a global partnership. Geographical Information Systems (GIS) have been proposed as an advanced tool for managing variability in commercial vineyards, gaining a high-resolution spatial perspective on crop performance distribution and its underpinning reasons. Recent evolution of open- source GIS software democratized access and provided an easy and affordable way for vineyard managers to combine a «big picture» with zooming in at each individual plant, in representing diverse datasets and performing complex calculations in geographic representation. Newly available sets of climate, soil, water, ecosystem and biodiversity data are contributing to the capacity to integrate conservation management in commercial vineyards, making geomatic technology an essential tool to measure and manage sustainable development indicators. 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 geophysical and ecosystem characteristics and using those tools to design efficient drainage and measure non-crop areas for nature conservation. We propose those technologies to assess contributions for SDGs 12, 13, and 15.