Joaquim Sousa

• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at University of Trás-os-Montes and Alto Douro

Reduced-impact logging (RIL) has been recognized as a promising strategy for biodiversity conservation and carbon sequestration within sustainable forest management (SFM) areas. However, monitoring the forest understory—a critical area for assessing logging impacts—remains challenging due to limitations in conventional methods such as field invento...

Grapevines (Vitis vinifera L.) are one of the most economically relevant crops worldwide, yet they are highly vulnerable to various diseases, causing substantial economic losses for winegrowers. This systematic review evaluates the application of remote sensing and proximal tools for vineyard disease detection, addressing current capabilities, gaps...

The Douro Demarcated Region is fundamental to local cultural and economic identity. Despite its importance, the region faces the challenge of abandoned vineyard plots, caused, among other factors, by the high costs of maintaining vineyards on hilly terrain. To solve this problem, the European Union (EU) offers subsidies to encourage active cultivat...

Since the 1970s, extensive halite extraction in Maceió, Brazil, has resulted in significant geological risks, including ground collapses, sinkholes, and infrastructure damage. These risks became particularly evident in 2018, following an earthquake, which prompted the cessation of mining activities in 2019. This study investigates subsidence deform...

Precision agriculture (PA) has advanced agricultural practices, offering new opportunities for crop management and yield optimization. The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in PA enables high-resolution data acquisition, which has been adopted across different agricultural sectors. However, its application for decision support in chestnut plan...

Accurate detection and differentiation of grapevine canopies from other vegetation, along with individual grapevine row identification, pose significant challenges in precision viticulture (PV), especially within irregularly structured vineyards shaped by natural terrain slopes. This study employs aerial imagery captured by unmanned aerial vehicles...

Understanding geometric and biophysical characteristics is essential for determining grapevine vigor and improving input management and automation in viticulture. This study compares point cloud data obtained from a Terrestrial Laser Scanner (TLS) and various UAV sensors including multispectral, panchromatic, Thermal Infrared (TIR), RGB, and LiDAR...

Climate change has intensified the need for robust fire prevention strategies. Sustainable forest fuel management is crucial in mitigating the occurrence and rapid spread of forest fires. This study assessed the impact of vegetation clearing and/or grazing over a three-year period in the herbaceous and shrub parts of a Mediterranean oak forest. Usi...

Understanding and accurately predicting stomatal conductance in almond orchards is critical for effective water-management strategies, especially under challenging climatic conditions. In this study, machine-learning (ML) regression models trained on multispectral (MSP) and thermal infrared (TIR) data acquired from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) a...

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) technology has emerged as a pivotal tool in viticulture, offering unique capabilities for various applications. This study provides a comprehensive overview of the current state-of-the-art applications of SAR in viticulture, highlighting its significance in addressing key challenges and enhancing viticultural practice...

Classifying grapevine varieties is crucial in precision viticulture, as it allows for accurate estimation of vineyard row growth for different varieties and ensures authenticity in the wine industry. This task can be performed with time-consuming destructive methods, including data collection and analysis in the laboratory. In contrast, unmanned ae...

Water is essential for maintaining plant health and optimal growth in agriculture. While some crops depend on irrigation, others can rely on rainfed water, depending on regional climatic conditions. This is exemplified by grapevines, which have specific water level requirements, and irrigation systems are needed. However, these systems can be susce...

The Eurasian grapevine (Vitis vinifera L.) is the most widely grown horticultural crop in the world and is important for the economy of many countries. In the wine production chain, grape varieties play an important role as they directly influence the authenticity and classification of the product. Identifying the different grape varieties is there...

This systematic review explores the role of remote sensing technology in addressing the requirements of sustainable olive growing, set against the backdrop of growing global food demands and contemporary environmental constraints in agriculture. The critical analysis presented in this document assesses different remote sensing platforms (satellites...

The focus of this paper is to present an innovative approach to classify land cover, with specific emphasis on Land Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) monitoring. LULUCF is a sector in greenhouse gas inventory that tracks changes in greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere due to land use and land-use change. In this study, we employed Deep...

The Eurasian grapevine (\textit{Vitis vinifera L.}) is the most widely grown horticultural crop in the world and is important for the economy of many countries. In the wine production chain, grape varieties play an important role, as they directly influence the authenticity and classification of the product. Identifying the different grape varietie...

Almond cultivation is of great socio-economic importance worldwide. With the demand for almonds steadily increasing due to their nutritional value and versatility, optimizing the management of almond orchards becomes crucial to promote sustainable agriculture and ensure food security. The present systematic literature review, conducted according to...

Almonds are becoming a central element in the gastronomic and food industry worldwide. Over the last few years, almond production has increased globally. Portugal has become the third most important producer in Europe, where this increasing trend is particularly evident. However , the susceptibility of almond trees to changing climatic conditions p...

Grape varieties play an important role in wine’s production chain, its identification is crucial for controlling and regulating the production. Nowadays, two techniques are widely used, ampelography and molecular analysis. However, there are problems with both of them. In this scenario, Deep Learning classifiers emerged as a tool to automatically c...

Grape moths are a significant pest in vineyards, causing damage and losses in wine production. Pheromone traps are used to monitor grape moth populations and determine their developmental status to make informed decisions regarding pest control. Smart pest monitoring systems that employ sensors, cameras, and artificial intelligence algorithms are b...

Bogotá, the largest urban center and capital city of Colombia, is located within the Bogotá savanna, which originated as a lake in the central part of the Colombian Eastern Cordillera. Over time, the lake transformed into a gently undulating plain with horizontally deposited sediments that formed around five million years ago. Over the last few dec...

Global warming presents a significant threat to the sustainability of agricultural systems, demanding increased irrigation to mitigate the impacts of prolonged dry seasons. Efficient water management strategies, including deficit irrigation, have thus become essential, requiring continuous crop monitoring. However, conventional monitoring methods a...

The almond tree (Prunus dulcis (Mill.) D. A. Webb) is a growing crop worldwide. This expansion was manifested in Portugal by the establishment of new plantations, the intensification of the production system, and the growth of irrigated area. To meet demands for almonds, it is essential to invest in agricultural technologies that will improve produ...

The European Union (EU) established through the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) an aid system and subsidies for farmers that cultivate vineyards. Eligible areas should be controlled and registered in Geographic Information Systems. The agencies paying this support must check that the parcels have an agricultural activity through an on-the-spot che...

The Benínar Dam, located in Southeastern Spain, is an earth-fill dam that has experienced filtration issues since its construction in 1985. Despite the installation of various monitoring systems, the data collected are sparse and inadequate for the dam’s lifetime. The present research integrates Multi-Temporal Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Rad...

In recent years, the use of remote sensing data obtained from satellite or unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery has grown in popularity for crop classification tasks such as yield prediction, soil classification or crop mapping. The ready availability of information, with improved temporal, radiometric, and spatial resolution, has resulted in the...

Globally, insect pests are the primary reason for reduced crop yield and quality. Although pesticides are commonly used to control and eliminate these pests, they can have adverse effects on the environment, human health, and natural resources. As an alternative, integrated pest management has been devised to enhance insect pest control, decrease t...

In Portugal, almonds are a very important crop, due to their nutritional properties. In the northeastern part of the country, the almond sector has endured over time, with strong cultural traditions and key economic significance. In these areas, several cultivars are used. In effect, the presence of various almond cultivars implies differentiated m...

The bedbug and the grape moth are the most significant pests affecting rice and vineyards, causing great damage. However, these pests are only two examples of the many insect pests that exist with great potential to cause significant crop damage. Insect traps are among the most appropriate solution for monitoring and counting, influencing the selec...

Remote-sensing processes based on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) have opened up new possibilities to both map and extract individual plant parameters. This is mainly due to the high spatial data resolution and acquisition flexibility of UAVs. Among the possible plant-related metrics is the leaf area index (LAI), which has already been successfully...

Monitoring invasive plant species is a crucial task to assess their presence in affected ecosystems. However, it is a laborious and complex task as it requires vast surface areas, with difficult access, to be surveyed. Remotely sensed data can be a great contribution to such operations, especially for clearly visible and predominant species. In the...

The increasing use of geospatial information from satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has been contributing to significant growth in the availability of instruments and methodologies for data acquisition and analysis. For better management of vineyards (and most crops), it is crucial to access the spatial-temporal variability. This knowl...

Citation: Sousa, J.J.; Toscano, P.; Matese, A.; Di Gennaro, S.F.; Berton, A.; Gatti, M.; Poni, S.; Pádua, L.; Hruška, J.; Morais, R.; et al. UAV-Based Hyperspectral Monitoring Using Push-Broom and Snapshot Sensors: A Multisite Assessment for Precision Viticulture Applications. Sensors 2022, 22, 6574.

The water content in an agricultural crop is of crucial importance and can either be estimated through proximal or remote sensing techniques, allowing better irrigation scheduling and avoiding extreme water stress periods. However, the current climate change context is increasing the use of eco-friendly practices to reconcile water management and t...

Three-dimensional (3D) image mapping of real-world scenarios has a great potential to provide the user with a more accurate scene understanding. This will enable, among others, unsupervised automatic sampling of meaningful material classes from the target area for adaptive semi-supervised deep learning techniques. This path is already being taken b...

Environment understanding in real-world scenarios has gained an increased interest in research and industry. The advances in data capture and processing allow a high-detailed reconstruction from a set of multi-view images by generating meshes and point clouds. Likewise, deep learning architectures along with the broad availability of image datasets...

The monitoring procedures with different geotechnical/structural sensors and classical geodetic techniques including GNSS are the usual practices in most of the dams where these controls are established. Other geomatic techniques such as TLS, GB-SAR and multi-temporal InSAR (MT-InSAR), allow the determination of 3D displacements with the advantage...

Cities in Spain use to be overgrown around old towns (preroman, roman and medieval) constructed on topographic defensive heights of singular geological features. In the upper Guadalquivir valley, a tabular body of Miocene sediments has been eroded forming mesas where most of its population has been living since middle age. As the towns grew, new ne...

Proximity sensing approaches with a wide array of sensors available for use in precision viticulture contexts can nowadays be considered both well-know and mature technologies. Still, several in-field practices performed throughout different crops rely on direct visual observation supported on gained experience to assess aspects of plants’ phenolog...

Vineyard classification is an important process within viticulture-related decision-support systems. Indeed, it improves grapevine vegetation detection, enabling both the assessment of vineyard vegetative properties and the optimization of in-field management tasks. Aerial data acquired by sensors coupled to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) may be u...

Efficient detection and monitoring procedures of invasive plant species are required. It is of crucial importance to deal with such plants in aquatic ecosystems, since they can affect biodiversity and, ultimately, ecosystem function and services. In this study, it is intended to detect water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes) using multispectral data...

Modelling of material appearance from reflectance measurements has become increasingly prevalent due to the development of novel methodologies in Computer Graphics. In the last few years, some advances have been made in measuring the light-material interactions, by employing goniometers/reflectometers under specific laboratory’s constraints. A wide...

The success achieved by using SAR data in the study of the Earth led to a firm commitment from space agencies to develop more and better space-borne SAR sensors. This involvement of the space agencies makes us believe that it is possible to increase the potential of SAR interferometry (InSAR) to near real-time monitoring. Among this ever-increasing...

The technological revolution that we have been witnessing recently has allowed components miniaturization and made electronic components accessible. Hyperspectral sensors benefited from these advances and could be mounted on unmanned aerial vehicles, which was unthinkable until recently. This fact significantly increased the applications of hypersp...

Wine is one the most important products from Portugal, being the grapevine variety very important to ensure uniqueness, authenticity and classification. In the Douro Demarcated Region, only certain grapevine varieties are allowed, implying the need for an identification mechanism. The ampelographs, professionals that use visual analysis to classify...

Wine is the most important product from the Douro Region, in Portugal. Ampelographs are disappearing, and farmers need new solutions to identify grapevine varieties to ensure high-quality standards. The development of methodology capable of automatically identify grapevine are in need. In the scenario, deep learning based methods are emerging as th...

Geological disasters are responsible for the loss of human lives and for significant economic and financial damage every year. Considering that these disasters may occur anywhere—both in remote and/or in highly populated areas—and anytime, continuously monitoring areas known to be more prone to geohazards can help to determine preventive or alert a...

Business models built upon multimedia/multisensory setups delivering user experiences within disparate contexts-entertainment, tourism, cultural heritage, etc.-usually comprise the installation and in-situ management of both equipment and digital contents. Considering each setup as unique in its purpose, location, layout, equipment and digital cont...

Alto Douro Wine Region is located in the Northeast of Portugal and is classified by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. Snaked by the Douro River, the region has been producing wines for over 2000 years, with the world-famous Porto wine standing out. The vineyards, in that region, are built in a territory marked by steep slopes and the almost inexiste...

Materials represented by measured BRDF (Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution function) with reflectance data captured from real-world materials have become increasingly prevalent due to the development of novel measurement approaches. Nowadays, important limitations can be highlighted in the current material scanning process, mostly related to th...

The development and implementation of a virtual environment that aims to support farmers in managing their land and crops in a more sustainable way is presented in this paper. It allows both textual and 3D visualization of croprelated biophysical parameters, such as height, volume and length. Moreover, the latter can be dynamically altered accordin...

Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry (InSAR) is a remote sensing technique very effective for the measure of smalldisplacements of the Earth’s surface over large areas at a very low cost as compared with conventional geodetictechniques. Advanced InSAR time series algorithms for monitoring and investigating surface displacement on Earth arebased...

Spatial and temporal variability characterization in Precision Agriculture (PA) practices is often accomplished by proximity data gathering devices, which acquire data from a wide variety of sensors installed within the vicinity of crops. Proximity data acquisition usually depends on a hardware solution to which some sensors can be coupled, managed...

Hyperspectral sensors mounted in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offer new opportunities to explore high-resolution multi-temporal spectral analysis in remote sensing applications. Nevertheless, the use of hyperspectral data still poses challenges mainly in postprocessing to correct from high geometric deformation of images. In general, the acquisi...

In a precision agriculture context, the amount of geospatial data available can be difficult to interpret in order to understand the crop variability within a given terrain parcel, raising the need for specific tools for data processing and analysis. This is the case for data acquired from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), in which the high spatial r...

Synthetic aperture radar interferometry (InSAR) is the technique capable of monitoring active landslide in all-weather conditions and in a near real-time. In this study, ALOS-2 (L-band) and Sentinel-1 (C-Band) images were used to map potential areas prone to the occurrence of large-scale landslide disasters. Differential InSAR (D-InSAR) and multi-t...

The ice avalanche disaster caused by glacier movements threatens the safety of the downstream area of the glacier. The monitoring method based on SAR data allows the detection of glaciers’ movement at all weather conditions. In addition, SAR-based techniques are capable of analyzing the phenomena in large area and with long time span which has impo...

We present outcomes from our experimental work towards identification of forest segments in Czech Jeseniky mountains damaged by a hurricane event on March 17, 2018. We have specifically processed Sentinel-1 satellite radar data and identified a functional methodology of extracting extents of the affected segments. The backscatter intensity of the d...

Multi-temporal InSAR (MT-InSAR) techniques proved to be very effective for deformation monitoring. However, decorrelation and other noise sources, can be limiting factors in MT-InSAR. The obtained observations (PS - Persistent scatterers) are usually very demanding from a computational perspective, as they can reach hundreds of thousands of observa...

Deformation monitoring is a common practice in most of dams to ensure their structural health and safety status. Systematic monitoring is frequently carried out by means of geotechnical sensors and geodetic techniques that, although very precise an accurate, can be time-consuming and economically costly. Remote sensing techniques are proved to be v...

Currently, the use of free and open-source software is increasing. The flexibility, availability, and maturity of this software could be a key driver to develop useful and interesting solutions. In general, open-source solutions solve specific tasks that can replace commercial solutions, which are often very expensive. This is even more noticeable...