National vineyard scan

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 ). 

Summary

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.