Grape Production Site Suitability

Link to Full Report

This project was designed to determine if warm-climate grapes could be grown elsewhere in the United States instead of California. As climate change continues to affect our crops, grape production and other produce will be greatly affected. Our study area encompassed the entire United States, with a primary focus on California. Data collection and our site suitability metric was driven by GuildSomm, an international organization for wine enthusiasts.

The most important factors when determining site suitability for grapes include solar radiation, average temperature, temperature extremes, heat accumulation/bioclimatic indices, ripening period temperatures, wind, and precipitation/humidity (Jones, 2015). However, the acceptable ranges for these categories varies considerably depending on type of grape and other geographical factors. The factors we ended up using were precipitation, solar radiation, and temperature. Full justification and methods can be found in the full report, with the results as follows:

Determining site suitability for crops, and grapes in particular, isn’t an exact science. It requires a lot of trial-and-error as well as a measure of subjectivity. With additional time and resources, we could construct a much more robust model that takes into account other important factors as well. This model shows the Tennessee/northern Georgia area would be best for growing grapes, which makes sense given that farming is a large industry there.

Future study could look at site suitability on a much smaller scale, possibly focusing on a single state like Tennessee. This way, we can do a lot more of an in-depth analysis, using factors that are a lot more relevant to that area and being able to pinpoint more exact locations that would be best for growing grapes.