Kelly Dvorak
Lesson 7: Agriculture
Napa county, CA - Suitable Vineyard Sites
Lesson criteria:
Within Napa County, California:
• Outside the floodplain and more than 100 meters from a stream
• Land use: agriculture or undeveloped, private
• Aspect (slope orientation) between 112 - 337 degrees or flat land
• Climate:
o Average maximum wind speed of 25 mph or less
o Average minimum temperature greater than 35 degrees
• Soil Qualities:
o Soil depth between 31 and 72 inches
o Medium - to highly drained soils (values of 1.5 - 3)
Project Goals:
Our objective is to help grape farmers identify suitable land for successful vineyard business. We must take into
consideration all of the criteria that is crucial for the success of a vineyard business and then present the results in
Map 1. In Map 2 we will further narrow the results by adding the additional criteria of private land vs public land.
Achieve these objectives by using the following methods:
1. Dissolving Land Use layers to leave only agricultural or undeveloped areas
2. Convert vector data to raster format: hydro, land use, ownership
3. Create hillshade and aspect layers from elevation data,
4. Interpolate a continuous surface from sample points: soil depth, max wind, min
temperature.
5. Create buffer zones around raster features: hydro to make floodplain buffer zones.
6. Perform distance calculations,
7. Reclassify continuous surface grids into discrete categories to designate suitable vs
unsuitable areas: hydro, land use, aspect, max wind, min temp, soil drainage.
8. Combine raster layers to show final suitable sites by performing map algebra calculations.
9. Calculate # of acres suitable for viticulture businesses; public and private vs. only private.
SUITABLE LAND FOR VINEYARDS Legend
NAPA CO., CA
Rivers
Vineyard Sites
Suitable Areas
Elevation
314
Floodplain Zone
0 0.15 0.3 0.6 Miles
County of Napa, Yolo County, California State Parks, Esri, HERE, Garmin,
SafeGraph, GeoTechnologies, Inc, METI/NASA, USGS, Bureau of Land
Management, EPA, NPS, US Census Bureau, USDA, Esri, NASA, NGA, USGS,
FEMA CREATED BY: KELLY DVORAK
JUNE 2023
Fig 1 - Areas within Napa County that are suitable to support wine grape growth and vineyard businesses based on climate, soil, and agricultural or undeveloped land use
data.
Fig. 1A – A screen shot of Map 1 and the suitablesites attribute table. Value 0 represents unsuitable areas and value 1
represents areas suitable for growing wine grapes. Suitable areas have a count of 51,432 cells, each cell representing a
10x10 meter area.
SUITABLE PRIVATE LAND FOR VINEYARDS
NAPA COUNTY, CA Legend
Rivers
Suitable Sites
Private Land
Suitable Sites
Public Land
Elevation
314
Floodplain Area
County of Napa, Yolo County, California State Parks, Esri, HERE, Garmin,
SafeGraph, GeoTechnologies, Inc, METI/NASA, USGS, Bureau of Land
Management, EPA, NPS, US Census Bureau, USDA, Esri, NASA, NGA, USGS,
FEMA
DATE: JUNE 2023
BY: KELLY DVORAK
0 0.25 0.5 1 Miles
Fig 2 - A map showing public and private areas that have been found suitable for viticulture businesses. Land has been deemed
suitable for wine grape gowrth based on soil data, sope, climate data, private agricultural or undeveloped land use designation.
Fig. 2A – A screen shot suitablesites2 attribute table used to create Map 2. There is a reduction to 28,911 cells from Map
1’s table because this map only includes private land.
Fig. 3 – Screenshot showing how the Land Ownership raster layer helped to narrow down the suitable vineyard areas
(green) by displaying the public areas (red) that area unavailable for development for viticulture businesses.
Conclusions:
Our target audience is wine grape farmers and viticulture business investors looking for suitable
land to start and support vineyards in this area of Napa County CA. Map 1 (fig. 1) takes into consideration
a long list of criteria needed to support wine grape growth such as land use designated agriculture or
undeveloped, soil drainage, climate characteristics, hill slope, etc. I noticed there are ripples in the suitable
area zone on the west portion of the map, which is likely due to slope orientation falling outside of the
aspect parameters set in the criteria. There was 1270.9 suitable acres for vineyard businesses.
Map 2 helps to narrow down the search for suitable vineyard sites by incorporating land
ownership data. Private land was designated suitable, whereas public land is unsuitable for vineyard sites.
This distinction is displayed in the map by two different color greens. Instead of removing public lands
from Map 2, they were kept for reference to show suitable private land bordered by suitable public lands.
It may be beneficial to invest in private land neighboring public land that won’t be developed down the
road. Other features such as rivers, flood zones, and elevations are kept on both maps as they may be
important to the target audience. After removing public land from the suitable areas there were only
557.5 acres available. 713.4 acres were eliminated from the pool of potential sites.
Additional criteria I’d like to be considered to further these maps would be depth to groundwater for
irrigation needs and heavy metals in the soils that might affect grape growth. I am not sure if data would
be readily available, but if we had an individual client searching, I’d like to display land currently for sale
within the suitable zones.
High resolution data:
Higher resolution data could help with the overall quality of the maps. I noticed while zooming in that the
edges of the raster grid is very jagged caused by the cell size. Smaller cell size would create smoother or
finer lines. Having smoother and more concise edges would give a better idea of the exact boundaries of
these areas we are interested in looking at.
Citations:
King, E., Walrath, D., & Zeiders, M. (1999-2023). Problem-Solving with GIS, Lesson 7/Additional Concepts.
The Pennsylvania State University World Campus Certificate/MGIS Programs in GIS. Retrieved
June, 27, 2023.
King, E., Walrath, D., & Zeiders, M. (1999-2023). Problem-Solving with GIS, Lesson 7/Part 1. The
Pennsylvania State University World Campus Certificate/MGIS Programs in GIS. Retrieved
June, 27, 2023.
King, E., Walrath, D., & Zeiders, M. (1999-2023). Problem-Solving with GIS, Lesson 7/Part 3. The
Pennsylvania State University World Campus Certificate/MGIS Programs in GIS. Retrieved June,
27, 2023.
DiBiase, David. (n.d.) Resolution | The Nature of Geographic Information. Retrieved June, 28,
2023. https://www.education.psu.edu/natureofgeoinfo/c8_p7.html#:~:text=Spatial%20resolu
tion%20refers%20to%20the%20coarseness%20or%20fineness,as%20small%20or%20smaller%
20than%20one%20square%20meter.
