Consilium Technology has completed its National Vineyard Scan, which was conducted on behalf of Wine Australia to get a clear picture of the country’s grape and wine sector.

The company used geospatial artificial intelligence for agriculture (GAIA) technology to capture satellite images of wine regions in Australia and provide highly accurate vineyard data covering five million hectares of land. This data will be used to assess planting densities by geographical indication (GI) region and sub-region.

The vineyards covered a total area of 146,128ha, with a vine row length of 463,718km. These are set into 75,961 individual blocks with an average vine row density of 3.17km/ha. The vineyard area within each GI sub-region was also captured.

Wine Australia CEO Andreas Clark said: “This scan provides the sector with a very good baseline for follow-up surveys that will be carried out over the next two years.

“The last ABS survey set the total reported area of vineyards at 135,133 hectares, about 8% less than the Vineyard Scan found, but because of the differences in the methods used it is unwise to assign all of that difference to growth in plantings. Some of that difference is likely to be the difference between estimated returns in the survey and actual mapping.”

Wine Australia further added that the locations of all vineyard blocks detected have been mapped, providing information that can be used for emergency biosecurity responses.

Data provided by the company will replace the old Australian Bureau of Statistics paper-based sector survey, which was last published in 2015.