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MULTI-CRITERIAL GIS ANALYSIS FOR IDENTIFYING OPTIMUM LOCATION FOR VINEYARD PLACEMENT. CASE STUDY: MOLDOVA REGION, ROMANIA

Andrei Enea

Abstract

Wine has always been a valued commodity, from ancient civilizations, up to current times, both from a quantitative point of view, and a qualitative one. Humans have been cultivating vineyards for thousands of years, with differential success. This has always been dependent on several, mostly natural factors. Even the most resilient varieties of grape vines require some specific conditions to optimally grow, such as climatic factors (including specific growing temperatures, precipitation, sun exposure, number of annual, frost-free days etc), pedological factors (soil type, texture), or geomorphometrical parameters, including terrain declivity, slope orientation, or hypsometry. Also, land use is a major factor, inducing both benefic effects on vineyards, and unfavorable ones, taking into consideration the vicinity with various forms of land use, which could influence through favoring surface erosion, blocking direct sunlight, potential pollution or other means of human intervention. In addition, land use evolution represents good indication of the varying degree of vineyard resilience, which can be quantified on a timely basis, comparing several years of official land use data. Economic considerations dictate the location of vineyards, and mostly restrict the optimal positioning of smaller sized ones. Despite not being on ideal placements, on several occasions facing precarious growing conditions, with lower productivity values, smaller vineyards have managed to become popular on numerous households, mostly in rural areas. Low productions do not represent the norm, due to which studies that identify the best locations for placing vineyards are highly recommended, in order to increase productivity, and therefore, financial incentives. The current study aims to spatialize the most relevant parameters that influence the proper growth of vineyards, in order to identify the optimal locations of their placement, based on GIS analysis, using an approach based on integrating classified thematic layers, into a geoformula, with corresponding, representative, spatial results.

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/sgem2019/2.2/s11.115

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