Post is late this weekend because of a camping trip, but this morning I went to the Pima Air and Space Museum. You would not know it at first, but there is actually quite a bit of GIS to observe in the museum. We can ignore the obvious use of navigational charts. There was a display of the history of military and civilian remote sensing. Early use of Radar and sonar lead to the development of other remote sensing techniques.
Analyzing Raster to Make Virginia Vineyards Vaster
Using raster data to predict future agricultural potential has been around for a long time. It was one of the primary reasons that satellite platform remote sensing was developed. What is interesting about viticulture is that it takes years to develop. With other agriculture your overall goal is long term, but you work in system that is based in seasons. If you have a bad year you can always look toward the next year. If you have a problem with pests you can rotate out your crops and eliminate them. With viticulture, years are spent just developing the soil and the vines to the point where you can put out a decent product.
One of the nice things about predictive models is that they do not take much time anymore. Our processing power is pretty good these days so you can run multiple models or rerun models with new data. So if things do not quite come out the way the model predicted you can try to identify the variables that did not work out well and update your model. If everyone keeps doing that we might be able to dial in effective modelling techniques.