The North Carolina wine industry is growing at a fast pace. Many new vineyards are being planted with European varieties. Vitis vinifera varieties in general are the most challenging species of grape grown, requiring considerable effort to consistently produce yields of appropriate volume and good quality. The model produced in this research was designed to help guide site selection for V. vinifera vineyards in the North Carolina Piedmont. This is accomplished using a site suitability model and predictive geophysical parameters. The area of interest is Rockingham County, North Carolina. The model consists of four sets of factors each weighted and combined into sub-model composites. These sub-model composites represent the capability/suitability of: topography, soil, land use/land cover, and climate. The four sub-model composites were weighted and combined to produce the final output that summarizes the viticultural site suitability for the study area.

Advances in remote sensing and small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS) have been applied to various precision agriculture applications. However, there has been limited research on the accuracy of real-time kinematic (RTK) sUAS photogrammetric elevation surveys, especially in preparation for precision agriculture practices that require precise topographic surfaces, such as increasing irrigation system efficiency. These practices include, but are not limited to, precision land grading, placement of levees, multiple inlet rice irrigation, and computerized hole size selection for furrow irrigation. All such practices rely, in some way, on the characterization of surface topography. While agro-terrestrial (ground-based) surveying is the dominant method of agricultural surveying, aerial surveying is emerging and attracting potential early adopters. This is the first study of its kind to assess the accuracy, precision, time, and cost efficiency of RTK sUAS surveying in comparison to traditional agro-terrestrial techniques. Our findings suggest sUAS are superior to ground survey methods in terms of relative elevation and produce much more precise raster surfaces than ground-based methods. We also showed that this emergent technology reduces costs and the time it takes to generate agricultural elevation surveys.

The Lower Mississippi River Basin (LMRB) is a crucial area known for its intensive agricultural production that is heavily dependent on the Mississippi River Valley Alluvial Aquifer (MRVAA) for irrigation. This region's agriculture relies extensively on this underlying aquifer to sustain its crop production needs. Extensive irrigation with groundwater, coupled with regional geology, has led to significant groundwater decline. The LMRB includes large areas of eastern Arkansas and Louisiana, western Tennessee and Mississippi, and the bootheel of Missouri, with the most severe overdraft of the MRVAA occurring in the Mississippi Delta region of Arkansas and Mississippi, which is therefore the regional focus of this paper. In parts of Arkansas, the decline has been so severe that these areas have been designated as Critical Groundwater Areas. This manuscript identified relevant literature that pinpoints challenges and the strategies used in response to the decline. Experimental strategies being explored to potentially increase groundwater levels include case studies of managed aquifer recharge (MAR) using infiltration galleries (IGs), riverbank filtration coupled with groundwater transfer followed by injection wells, and repurposed borrow pits, which are all techniques tailored to the region's hydrogeology. Strategies to transition irrigation from groundwater to surface water involve on‐farm reservoir‐tailwater recovery systems (R‐TWRS), which store and recycle irrigation runoff and excess precipitation to reduce groundwater dependence. Findings from this paper demonstrate how conservation strategies such as MAR and R‐TWRS are designed to mitigate the ongoing decline of the alluvial aquifer that is crucial for the economic and ecological sustainability of the LMRB. This article is categorized under: Engineering Water > Sustainable Engineering of Water Engineering Water > Planning Water Water and Life > Conservation, Management, and Awareness