New developments and opportunities for AI in viticulture, pomology, and soft-fruit research: a mini-review and invitation to contribute articles

Abstract

Climate change constraints on horticultural production and emerging consumer requirements for fresh and processed horticultural products with an increased number of quality traits have pressured the industry to increase the efficiency, sustainability, productivity, and quality of horticultural products. The implementation of Agriculture 4.0 using new and emerging digital technologies has increased the amount of data available from the soil–plant–atmosphere continuum to support decision-making in these agrosystems. However, to date, there has not been a unified effort to work with these novel digital technologies and gather data for precision farming. In general, artificial intelligence (AI), including machine/deep learning for data modeling, is considered the best approach for analyzing big data within the horticulture and agrifood sectors. Hence, the terms Agriculture/AgriFood 5.0 are starting to be used to identify the integration of digital technologies from precision agriculture and data handling and analysis using AI for automation. This mini-review focuses on the latest published work with a soil–plant–atmosphere approach, especially those published works implementing AI technologies and modeling strategies.