High-resolution imaging of a vineyard in south of France using ground penetrating radar and electromagnetic induction

GPR and EMI surveys were carried out in a vineyard in southern France in order to produce high-resolution maps of soil stratigraphy and to retrieve soil hydrogeophysical properties of the different soil layers. The preliminary results presented in this paper show large spatial variations of the vineyard soil properties, which are in accordance with the distribution of the different soil types within the study area. This is particularly observable from soil electrical conductivity data, which show strong spatial correlation with large areas of comparable values delimited by well-defined discontinuities, revealing sharp variations of soil characteristics over short distances. These discontinuities almost systematically correspond to the limits of the vineyard plots, though areas of contrasted soil electrical conductivity values are also found within some plots. Furthermore, the patterns of soil electrical conductivity are in good agreement with soil stratigraphy observed from GPR measurements. Finally, these results also highlighted compaction as a likely explanation to vine vigour problems observed locally in the vineyard. Future work will focus on the full-waveform inversion of GPR and EMI data to retrieve the properties of the different soil layers and to investigate the spatial variation of soil water availability in the study area, and provide on this basis recommendations for the vineyard management.