Researching the use of UAVs to monitor vineyard assets in southern British Columbia

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The College of New Caledonia and Church & State Wines are collaborating on an applied research project to explore the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to monitor vineyard assets. Church & State Wines is a premium quality, boutique winery situated in the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia. The ability to effectively monitor high-value grape crops through to harvest is a major challenge to producing quality wine in an extremely competitive global market. The use of UAVs could be an important innovation that provides real-time cost-effective data to help winery operators make decisions regarding their crops throughout the growing cycle. This project will focus on researching optimal UAV flight and camera parameters to capture critical foliage and grape characteristics with aerial digital images. This project will benefit Church & State Wines through the adoption of an innovative process that reduces operating costs and increases the value of their grape yields by using real-time data to optimize management and harvest activities. College students will benefit through training in the UAV operation and data collection, digital image analysis and adopting emerging technologies into specialized industries.