Pedological survey
The pedological characterization of the experimental site follows the analysis of the forms of the territory in the study area, with the aim of guaranteeing the best choice, in terms of homogeneity of the environmental and pedological characteristics of the experimental plots. These plots were defined after the soil characterization
So the first step was to create an orthogonal flight with DJI Phantom 4 RTK drone for the realization of the high resolution digital terrain model (DTM).
The analysis of remote sensing images from drone were
analyzed with PIX4D software.
The analysis of the DTM of the study area allowed to identify the area of interest (AOI) where the characteristics of the territory such as slope and exposure were homogeneous.
In practice, the choice was dictated by the need to identify a portion of the field with a plant of the same age and with a little variable trend of the geomorphological characteristics influencing the vineyard (slope, exposure and Topographic Wetness Index), in which there were little or no signs of earth movements linked to natural and anthropic processes.
Once the AOI was identified, it was possible to carry out the soil survey supported by the geophysical survey .
This investigation allows the spatial verification of the trend of a physical parameter of the soil (apparent electrical conductivity ECa) strictly related to the water content, the salt concentration and the clay content and therefore capable of highlighting variations in the soil in space. The resulting information layer therefore allows you to "direct" the soil survey campaign for the opening of profiles, mini-pits and drills.
From the field activity it emerged that the profiles described were a variant of the P1 profile, which for this reason was classified as a representative profile of the AOI and sampled in its horizons for the chemical-physical analyzes on disturbed and undisturbed samples.
Having verified the spatial variability of the soil and the geomorphological characteristics of the AOI, the functionally homogeneous areas (fHZs) were outlined for setting up the experimental test. In this regard, 6 portions of the field (maxi plot) have been identified, which will be destined for differentiated soil processing (sown, natural and worked), within which (in white) homogeneous crop sampling areas have been circumscribed , more restricted, to minimize the effects on the theses of the variability of the soil found and of the micromorphological characters of the slope.
