The growing impact of climate change on the wine sector – a strategic industry for both regional development and the Portuguese economy – has made it essential to rethink current production models in response to emerging challenges. Frost, prolonged droughts and intense rainfall increasingly threaten grape quality and yields, putting harvests at risk. At the same time, global trends point to declining wine production, shrinking vineyard areas and falling wine consumption, particularly in traditional markets.
Against this backdrop, the environmental, agronomic and economic drivers for change are clear. The sector now needs to adopt more efficient management approaches that create added value through differentiation and a stronger focus on quality. According to Rui Martins, a researcher at INESC TEC, “soil degradation, water scarcity, biodiversity loss and the effects of climate change require a deep transformation of production systems, focusing on resilience, ecological regeneration and agronomic efficiency.”
The REGESMART+ project was created with this in mind; bringing together organisations from the plant-based biopharmaceutical industry and research institutions specialising in plant bioengineering, biosystems, bioengineering and precision agriculture, the project aims to “integrate regenerative practices with digital monitoring technologies to promote a more sustainable and resilient viticulture”. The vision is to develop a new generation of precision viticulture based on a “holistic and regenerative” approach, treating the plant–soil relationship as a “functional unit for diagnosis and management”.
According to Rui Martins, “by monitoring the vine’s ‘vital signs’ in real time – using intelligent sensors (wearables), optical technologies, remote sensing and digital twin models – the project will develop tools for physiological diagnosis and personalised agronomic recommendations”. By collecting and analysing this information, it will become possible to implement management practices that are “more efficient, resilient and tailored to the specific conditions of each individual plant and its ecosystem”.
The project is structured around four main pillars. The first focuses on “developing physiological indicators with practical applications for vineyard management”; the second aims to create “digital diagnostic models using optical technologies and advanced sensors”; the third involves the development of “an integrated digital decision-support platform”; and the fourth centres on the “design of next-generation biological solutions”.
Phenoware: a system made in INESC TEC
At the core of the transformation envisioned by REGESMART+ is Phenoware, a technology developed by INESC TEC. The solution combines multi-scale metabolic and physiological monitoring of plants, soil and the microbiome. This monitoring is carried out using wearable devices (the same technology that will be deployed throughout the project) together with digital twins capable of “reconstructing the biological state of the plant, from molecular and cellular processes through to its physiological behaviour in the field”.
Until now, research in this area has largely relied on “single-parameter instrumentation”, providing only intermittent measurements and offering “no causal information about physiological processes or the plant’s metabolic and thermodynamic flows”. In practice, this meant researchers could only capture a snapshot of the plant’s condition during measurement, rather than continuously monitor the development and identify opportunities for optimisation.
Phenoware introduces a fundamentally different approach. For the first time, it enables researchers to “observe and infer, in real time, the critical metabolic processes that determine crop physiological performance”. This paves the way for optimising photosynthetic and thermodynamic efficiency, improving resource use and supporting regenerative processes. At the same time, the platform integrates genome-scale metabolic models, making it possible to identify the molecular mechanisms underlying observed physiological responses. This enables a continuous characterisation of both the plant’s phenotypic state and the metabolic activity of its cells.
According to Rui Martins, “the use of multi-scale models – spanning the cell, tissue, structural and whole-plant levels – makes it possible to understand how adaptive phenotypic plasticity reorganises plant metabolism in response to environmental conditions”. The resulting knowledge provides a scientific foundation for “individualised, predictive agricultural management aimed at maximising both productivity and the sustainability of agricultural systems”.
A value chain built around knowledge transfer
REGESMART+ brings together a consortium of 10 Portuguese organisations covering the entire agricultural biotechnology value chain, creating the conditions to accelerate the transfer of scientific knowledge into practical applications. To achieve this ambition, the project will also develop “upscaling platforms capable of accelerating the transfer of laboratory-developed solutions” to real-world agricultural settings. These include biostimulants, biopesticides derived from bioactive compounds extracted from vineyard by-products. e.g., as pruning wood, grape must and grape pomace, and microbiome-based technologies, including plant growth-promoting bacteria and mycorrhizal fungi.
Artificial Intelligence (AI), one of the project’s enabling technologies, will also play a central role. AI will support the development of diagnostic indicators for decision-making, analyse complex datasets – including optical, metabolomic, climatic and agronomic information – and generate personalised biological recommendations using predictive models and machine learning techniques.
While the long-term ambition is to enable intelligent agronomic prescriptions through an advanced deep-tech approach, REGESMART+ also aims to establish Portugal as a pioneer in this field. Aligned with the strategic priorities of Portugal 2030 (PT2030), the European Green Deal, the EU Soil Mission and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, the project supports the sustainable transition of the wine sector. INESC TEC’s contribution focuses on “pivoting and scaling up advanced biotechnology and bioengineering technologies for regenerative agriculture”.
Researchers at the Institute will design technologies to optimise and accelerate the development of biotechnological products using high-throughput experimental platforms. They will also co-develop upscaling methodologies to transfer these solutions from the laboratory to the field, using digital twins alongside advanced monitoring and simulation systems to validate and support the efficient large-scale implementation of regenerative agricultural systems. INESC TEC will further contribute to the development of advanced plant-driven agriculture systems by integrating metabolic monitoring, multi-scale modelling and digital twins.
Additional activities include validating physiological and metabolic indicators and making them available through a decision-support platform. In parallel, researchers will develop next-generation biostimulants with the potential to be integrated into future intelligent recommendation systems. These activities build on the work initiated under PhenoBot – Smart Photonics for Agri-Food Crop Phenotyping, an initiative funded through Portugal’s Recovery and Resilience Plan.
Looking ahead, Rui Martins believes the project will lead to “a benchmark technological platform with the potential to play a strategic role in transforming Portuguese and European agriculture”. At the same time, it will help accelerate the adoption of “intelligent, sustainable regenerative systems tailored to the performance of each individual plant” – an approach widely recognised as Precision Agriculture 5.0.
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