Over recent decades, the spread of Esca – a destructive trunk disease – has increased significantly in Luxembourg and worldwide. Its symptoms appear irregularly, often late in the season, making field monitoring difficult. This unpredictability, coupled with its long-term economic impact, highlighted the need for a more precise and efficient approach to disease surveillance.

The MonESCA1 project responded by developing a drone-based system to capture high-resolution spatial data from vineyards, enabling accurate, year-by-year tracking of Esca symptoms. This consistent data collection allowed researchers to investigate potential links between symptom expression and factors like weather events (e.g., frost, drought, excess moisture), vine variety, age and management methods.

To make field data collection easier, a tablet app was created to digitally record symptom intensity for each vine. The project also developed image-based classification methods using drone footage to map symptoms and generate Esca-specific risk maps. Notably, multi-year monitoring revealed that up to 50% of symptomatic vines showed no symptoms in the following year, underlining the disease’s complex behaviour.

In the field, long-term trials were established to test both preventive techniques (such as gentle pruning) and interventions like the reset method, re-grafting or replanting. Analyses of harvest yield and must weight were also conducted to better understand the economic impact of Esca.

MonESCA2, the project’s second phase, focused on translating insights into actionable guidelines and simplifying drone-based monitoring by using less complex camera technology. This helped reduce data processing needs and made the system more accessible for practical use by growers.

Findings from both phases were made available through the project website www.monesca.lu, where users could access a visualisation tool and field-specific data. While IVV plots were publicly accessible, winegrowers could log in to view data only for their own parcels.

The project’s systematic, multi-year approach proved essential for developing economically viable recommendations and empowering winegrowers to manage Esca with greater precision and foresight.