• Tree-level sustainability and relative profitability assessment in traditional olive groves. • Multisensor integration of RGB and multispectral UAV data. • Generation of high-resolution structural and physiological inventories at tree level. • Spatially explicit analysis of intra-plot variability in productivity and management effort. • Decision-support framework for site-specific management in heterogeneous olive orchards. The olive grove exhibits high spatial heterogeneity at the intra-parcel scale, associated with structural and physiological differences as well as local environmental conditions, even within the same farm. However, management practices are usually applied uniformly at the parcel scale, without accounting for this variability, which limits resource-use efficiency and compromises the sustainability of the production system. The main contribution of this work is the development of a multisensor inventory oriented toward sustainability analysis, in which the individual olive tree constitutes the minimum unit of study. To this end, a methodology based on data acquired from UAV platforms is proposed, integrating structural, physiological, and contextual information into a multidimensional inventory. Based on this inventory, potential incomes and management costs are estimated in a relative manner using reference values weighted according to the observed characteristics of each individual tree. This approach enables intra-parcel sustainability analysis and provides an objective decision-support basis for site-specific olive grove management, through a relative assessment based on the redistribution of mean income and cost values according to the individual behavior of each olive tree.
Latorre-Hortelano et al. (Fri,) studied this question.