| |
NewswireToday - /newswire/ -
Budapest, Hungary, 2014/07/29 - A decade ago, the involvement of smartphones and cloud based services in our everyday life seemed impossible. What’s more, nobody in viticulture has ever thought that such high tech technologies and services could support and transform daily vineyard.
|
| |
It is getting more common for viticulturists to make decisions when and what to spray while having their morning coffee even hundreds of kilometers away from the vineyard. From now on, experts don’t have to climb steep hillsides to check whether it is necessary to spray against powdery mildew or black rot, as relying on accurate disease predictions they can do it by using a few advanced sensors and a laptop connected to the internet. This technology helps some of the greatest European wineries making better decisions to reduce cost and pesticide use, optimize workforce, and produce high-quality wines from healthier grapes.
QuantisLabs Ltd. addresses the problem of cost-efficient protection against grape diseases by capturing and processing accurate weather parameters with its state of the art decision support system, SmartVineyard™. The device captures microclimatic data to calculate the probability and intensity of specific diseases and displays information on an intuitive user interface.
The system consists of two main components: the hardware for data acquisition and software for displaying forecast and providing vineyard management functionalities. Fitted with leading-edge sensors (temperature, humidity, leaf-wetness, precipitation and sunshine intensity), SmartVineyard™ devices have to be deployed in 5-8 hectares for capturing the most precise meteorological information. Due to the cellular communication system, all captured data is forwarded to, and stored in the central servers. Forecasts and alerts are accurately calculated with mathematical models and algorithms and sent to the users interface available on computers or any mobile devices.
"Before adopting SmartVineyard™ we had to base our decisions on intuitions rather than on facts. SmartVineyard™ gave us just the perfect solution to monitor environmental conditions and diseases even from home” says one of the test users of the prototype. „Now we can remotely track variables to better respond to challenges and manage our resources like pesticides, workforce, petrol and time.”
Besides the scalable wireless sensing system QuantisLabs also offers cloud computing services. Grape / wine producers can not only view real-time data with custom alerts, but have the access to historic data captured by the deployed devices. Moreover, users are also enabled to launch their private virtual stations coupled with some of the most relevant graphs and charts.
"Similar devices are already applied in Precision Viticulture, however, unlike other systems, SmartVineyard™ monitors microclimatic conditions and extends the variety of services by providing viticulturists the most accurate information on the intensity of major grape diseases” informs us Csaba Árendás, CEO for QuantisLabs Ltd. “Due to the special algorithms and mathematical models, our system gives grape and wine producers real-time insight to the spread of diseases, this way more conscious decisions could be made. We are excited in building a new community of grape growers by enabling them to make fact based decisions through easy weather and disease data analysis.”
Moreover, QuantisLabs (quantislabs.com) further extended its services by implementing SmartVineyard™ Lite to support grape growers with limited opportunities. These virtual stations consists of only a private user interface to display calculations and predictions based on the GPS coordinates of the vineyard. By providing access for alerts and forecasts on diseases to viticulturists with smaller cultivated areas, QuantisLabs Ltd. intends to bring Precision Viticulture for those who could hardly afford costly technologies and to extend SmartVineyard™ community.
|
info[.]quantislabs.com 
