One of the most important agricultural activities in Portugal is wine production. There are several areas in continental Portugal where the majority of the land is used for vineyards. There is a potential for satellite image data to be used for the monitoring of the vineyards used for wine production, both due to the new and improved satellite sensors, and also due to the wider and easier access to data. One of the sensors that provide frequent data with reduced costs is the VEGETATION. The purpose of this work was to evaluate the usefulness of the VEGETATION NDVI data to characterise the phenology of the different wine production areas in Portugal. The CORINE Land Cover maps from 2000 were initially used to select 5 test areas with over 90% vineyard land cover. These test sites have between 18 and 93 km~2 and are located in 4 different regions: Douro (2 sites), Estremadura, Sado and Alentejo. The NDVI images from VEGETATION were used to produce temporal plots for each site, from 1988 to 2005 (36 images each year). Average temporal profiles were also produced for each region, using the 8 years of data. The differences between regions and the variability within years is discussed and compared with the wine production data available for each region.
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