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Wine grapes are known to typically be grown in certain areas of Australia. To find every vineyard block in the country we tried to source as much information as we could to roughly scope where we would search for vineyards. From this information we generated Areas of Interest (AOIs) to represent the areas we wanted to search for vineyards within, and assigned each AOI to an appropriate satellite image or images. Appropriate satellite images are recent images from the growing months of the years prior to the 2018 vintage. It was not always possible to find a recent and/or growing month match, and for these cases we would broaden our search to include older imagery and non-growing months. 85% of the total area of the AOIs was matched to imagery from the last 4 years.
The satellite images covering the AOIs were scanned - we ran GAIA’s machine learning algorithm over the extraction of each AOI from its corresponding satellite image(s) and yielded vineyard block shapes. To perform the National Scan 2018, we scanned ~ 5.1 million hectares of satellite imagery, finding ~ 146,128 hectares of vineyard blocks. A breakdown of total area scanned and total area of vineyards found by state is outlined in Table 1. A detailed breakdown of vineyard areas and lengths in each state, for each GI, is provided in Tables 2-7. The GI boundary files used for this per-GI analysis consist of the South Australia GI boundaries updated in mid-2018, and the updated boundaries for GIs in other states from early 2019. Consilium Technology thanks Wine Australia for providing these updated GI boundaries.
The output of GAIA yields “single-value” results. Definite boundaries are produced by GAIA and hence definite areas are computed for each vineyard block that is detected. The total area of all vineyards obtained by considering the area of each detected vineyard is 146,128 hectares. However, because there is obviously some inherent error or uncertainty in the predictions and thus areas computed by GAIA, we’d like to quantify this error or uncertainty. The calculation of the error and bounds on the “single-value” Australia-wide result is outlined in Section 2.2 ; we calculate the error to be ± 8,669 hectares with better than 95% confidence. The total area of vineyards as detected by GAIA is thus between 137,459 and 154,797 hectares.
Abstract
Foundation Data relating to wine production capability is of strategic importance to the Australian wine sector. Vineyard planting data was last made available by the Australia Bureau of Statistics (ABS) in 2015. Consilium Technology was engaged by Wine Australia in August 2018 to deliver a technical capability to resume the measurement of the production capacity of the Australian wine industry. The capability Consilium Technology developed is offered as a product 1 known as GAIA ( http://projectgaia.ai ).
Objectives
The project aims to identify and map the locations of all vineyards across Australia, to determine the total area of vineyards in Australia by geographical indication (GI) and to develop a repeatable, scalable, cost-effective solution for updating and tracking vineyard plantings over time.
Background
Grapevines are the foundation of the Australian wine sector. Australia has a very diverse supply base with vines grown in 65 GI regions across Australia and covering more than 100 different varieties. To assist with long-term planning in meeting global demand for wine and evolving consumer tastes, it is critical to understand how many hectares are under vine both by GI region and variety. As there is a relatively long lead time between planting and production, growers and wine producers require the ability to track changes in vineyard area nationally on a regular basis.
Foundational vineyard data was traditionally collected by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) via the Vineyard Census. However, this is no longer possible and the last Vineyard Census was reported in 2015.
Without mandatory powers to compel reporting, a survey does not have sufficient accuracy for the collection of foundation vineyard data, including variety information. It is also inefficient and expensive. A new approach is needed that is independent of the cooperation of individual respondents, cost-effective and repeatable.
Approach
The National Vineyard Scan project is the geolocation of all winegrape vineyards in Australia. The vineyards in Australia’s 65 wine regions will be accurately mapped for the first time using high-resolution satellite images and advanced machine learning to automatically recognise vineyards. Consilium Technology has been engaged by Wine Australia to deliver the National Scan for three years from 2018–2020.
Winegrape and wine levy-payers will be able to view the mapped vineyards in a web interface being developed by Consilium Technology. The software and the web interface are known as GAIA (Geospace Artificial Intelligence for Agriculture). Grapegrowers can also pay for additional features including crop health insights through the GAIA software.
Sector benefits
The results from this project will provide accurate geolocation for all vineyards in Australia to support vineyard management activities as well as biosecurity and environmental planning, strategy and processes. The statistical information regarding the total area and change in area over time, both in total and by Australian GI, will assist with business decision-making and sector planning.
