Puglia Olive Plains — Live Satellite Health Report

About this region

Puglia — the heel of Italy’s boot — is home to millions of olive trees, many of them centuries old, and is Italy’s largest olive oil producing region. The Tavoliere plain and the surrounding rolling country are planted to Coratina and Ogliarola varieties, producing robust, peppery oils that form the backbone of Italian olive oil production. Some trees in this region are over a thousand years old, making these groves a cultural-heritage landscape as much as an agricultural one.

Climate & growing cycle

The climate is hot Mediterranean with very dry summers and mild winters. The deep clay-limestone soils retain what little moisture falls. Olives flower in April–May and harvest from November to January. The traditional trees are widely spaced and goblet-pruned, producing a sparse, open canopy that limits water loss — a millenia-old adaptation to the region’s chronic summer drought.

Satellite monitoring insights

Puglia has been at the front line of Xylella fastidiosa, a bacterial disease that has killed millions of olive trees since 2013 — the largest agricultural biological disaster in modern European history. Monitoring the canopy here is not just agronomy; it is watching a cultural-heritage landscape under existential threat. NDVI runs low (0.2–0.4) for healthy traditional groves — this is normal for the open, widely spaced canopy. A persistent, multi-year decline in NDVI may signal disease, drought, or both, and the spatial pattern of decline across the grove can indicate whether the cause is pathogen-driven (patchy spread) or drought-driven (uniform stress). SAVI is essential for correcting the bare-soil signal between widely spaced trees.

Key metrics

Index	Typical range	Disease-monitoring signal
NDVI	0.2–0.4	Persistent decline = possible Xylella or drought
NDMI	−0.3 to 0.1	Chronic summer water stress
SAVI	0.1–0.3	Corrects for bare soil between wide-spaced trees

Free report: Get a live satellite health analysis of Puglia’s ancient olive groves this month — see canopy stability, water stress, and whether the trees are holding on for free, no signup. Check the groves →