Utilizing NASA Earth Observations to Monitor Vineyards in Virginia

The Virginia Wine Board promotes the interests of vineyards and wineries in the Commonwealth through research, education and marketing. In that spirit, the Wine Board partnered with Wise DEVELOP to map the extent of Virginia vineyards. Current vineyard monitoring practices require land surveys and reports from owners, and the vineyards are identified and mapped by their street addresses and not their actual locations. High-resolution images were used to digitize the extent of all vineyards in Virginia. Vineyard extent was measured using data from Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI), which was downloaded from USGS Earth Explorer for the year 2014. Training sets were created from various locations across the state.

A supervised classification was carried out using those training sets to identify the productive vineyards. Cropland data, obtained from the US Department of Agriculture for the years 2008 to 2014, were stacked to identify the dominant type in the area. The results of this project will inform the Virginia Wine Board of the extent of the vineyards in their efforts to explore the possibilities of extension.

Location

Wise County Clerk of Court's Office and the Patrick Henry Building

Term

Spring 2015

Partner(s)

Virginia Wine Board

NASA Earth Observations

Landsat 8 OLI

Team

Rajkishan Rajappan (Project Lead)
Brittany Craft
Cassandra Morgan
Mebrat Desta
Michael Ngamije
Zachary Tate

Advisor(s)

Dr. Kenton Ross (NASA DEVELOP)
Dr. DeWayne Cecil (Global Science and Technology Inc.)

Project Video