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Precision Agriculture/Viticulture Research

Susan Hubbard

Susan S. Hubbard - MS Geophysics, PhD Engineering, UC Berkeley (1999) and Professional Certificate in Winemaking and Viticulture UC Davis (2009).

The majority of Susan’s precision agriculture research has focused on vineyards. The ability to optimize winegrape production necessitates an understanding of the factors that influence their spatial and temporal variability, including soils, climate, plants and management practices. While a significant fraction of precision viticulture has focused on investigating the link between winegrape parameters and above-ground factors (such as the training, cultivation, and harvest timing of the grapes), soil properties, which control water drainage, are critically important to winegrape quality. However, characterizing soils using traditional methods (such as by digging backhoe pits or collecting point measurements) has challenges, as these methods are laborious, invasive, and provide information at a single point in time/space only. Through using ground and airborne based geophysical methods, together with sparse point information, we strive to characterize the variability of soil and grapevine variability, and their co-variability, as well as to understand how soil hydrochemical properties influence grapevine behavior. Our work includes laboratory and field investigations as well as new sensing and data fusion approaches. Our objective is to develop tractable approaches that honor the natural variability of the ecosystem that can be used to guide vineyard management decisions, including planting and remediation.

Susan Hubbard’s Precision Agriculture Publications

Environmental Geophysics Research in other Agricultural Systems

Precision Viticulture Press Releases