Agricultural Management through Web GIS: The Catalan Vineyard Register

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Agricultural Management through Web GIS: The Catalan Vineyard Register

Jaume Royo Llobet
GIS Director
TAO-gedas
Email: jaume.royo@tao.es

Maria del Mar Juan
CVR Project Manager
Department of Agriculture (DARP)
Catalan Regional Government
Email: mjuan@gencat.net

Anna Guimet
GIS consultant
TAO-gedas
Email: anna.guimet@tao.es

Abstract
In 2004, the Catalan Department of Agriculture (DARP) developed an innovative GIS to manage geographically all the information about crops and plots of the region. The first step of the corporate GIS, totally web based, was to modernize the Catalan Vineyard Register (CVR). The company TAO-gedas was given the responsibility of managing, developing and starting up both projects. The project officially started up in September 2003 and its total completion is scheduled for the end of 2005. New improvements, as field data capture through mobile devices are planned for 2006. This GIS project applied to vineyards was awarded as one of the most innovative European projects in the ESRI conference of Paris 2004, and is an outstanding reality with its more that 500 intranet users, and 10.000 expected internet users (parcel owners and farmers).

Figure 1: Main Page of the Catalan Vineyard Register
Efficient management and better communication through GIS
Vinetyards have an important impact on the economy of the catalan region in Spain. The wine sector eleven regulatory councils, 660 wine cellars, 95 bottling plants and 26,800 vine growers, whose activity spreads over 89.000 vine-growing plots which occupy around 70.000 ha of cultivable land. Therefore, the aim of the project was to set up a unified, redundancy-free information system, in terms of both the alphanumeric register and the cartography to respond to the sector’s needs. The added value expected from the new CVR were:

To reduce administrative tasks by rationalising processes and procedures, thus making it possible to speed up the operations to be performed by vine growers (harvest declarations, uprooting or new plantation requests, etc.).
To integrate the GIS component into the vineyard register, in order to be able to edit, update, view, enquire into and analyse the geometric, administrative and agronomic characteristics of vine-growing plots directly from the cartography.
To work with a platform based on web technology, in order to enhance communication between the DARP and external agents (regulatory councils, wine cellars, cooperatives, etc.).

The integration between cartography and the vineyard register was the first step for building a corporate agriocultural GIS. Hence all tools developed were designed as an open tranverse system able to link to other agricultural databases (oil register, citrus cultivation register, fishing inventories, etc.).

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