A sensorless, Big Data based approach for phenology and meteorological drought forecasting in vineyards.

A web-based app was developed and tested to provide predictions of phenological stages of budburst, flowering and veraison, as well as warnings for meteorological drought. Such predictions are especially urgent under a climate change scenario where earlier phenology and water scarcity are increasingly frequent. By utilizing a calibration data set provided by 25 vineyards observed in the Emilia Romagna Region for two years (2021-2022), the above stages were predicted as per the binary event classification paradigm and selection of the best fitting algorithm based on the comparison between several metrics.