The Vineyard Yield Database

James Taylor, Bruno Tisseyre and Rob Bramley
 

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

This webpage is being constructed to manage a global vineyard database.  The database is designed to collect and summarise spatial information on vineyard yield data in an attempt to identify regional and varietal yield responses.  The information in the database will be used to define an "opportunity" score for the adoption of precision viticulture.  Currently the statistics in the database are modelled on the Opportunity Index of Pringle et al., 2003.  It is an aim of the collaborators to try and improve this approach.
The database has been initatied by The Australian Centre for Precision Agriculture (The University of Sydney), The Cooperative Research Centre for Viticulture (Australia), CSIRO Land and Water (Australia) and Agro Montpellier (France). The summary statistics from the database are freely available and it is hoped that other institutions will also contribute to the database.  The more diverse the database the more useful it will be.

The Database

The database is a summary of yield statistics not of yield data!  It is not our intention to publish raw data!  The database presents a variety of statistics, both classical and spatial, on yield reponse.  If you would like to contribute to the database then there are a several statistics that we would prefer and a guidlines for the calculation of these is given below.  As well as the yield statistics information on the region, climatic classifacation and general trellising system is also of interest.  However details on the exact vineyard name and location are not required.  The database has a strict confidentiality agreement attached to it (coming soon).  If you have any issues not covered by the confidentiality agreement please let the authors know.

 

A Standardised Approach

The database contains both classical and spatial statistics.  Classical statistics are generally easily calculated and understood.  Spatial statistics however, are less commonly used and understood.  Spatial statistics often derive from a variogram structures and can be subjective to both the program used and program user.  To try and standardise the approach to be taken in calculating the spatial statistics, a series of theoretical data sets have been derived to provide new users with data to practice on.  The results from the analysis of the theoretical data sets can then be compared to results from other contributors to minimise the operator bias in the statistics. The theoretical data sets, analysis code (for S-Plus and MatLab) and general instructions can be download from here as a zip file.  If you are contributing to the database we strongly recommend that the theoretical fields be analysed first.  If you have any concerns or questions please do not hesitate to contact the authors.
 

Further Information

Information from the database has been published at in Precison Agriculture '05 (edited by J.V. Stafford) that contains the proceedings of the 5th European Conference on Precision Agriculture.  Otherwise please contact James Taylor for further information.
 

Database (Coming Soon)