Abstract

The Okanagan valley in British Columbia, Canada, is well-known for its award winning wines. Today over 2 800 hectares of the central Okanagan, the area from Penticton to Kelowna, is covered by vineyards. An analysis of the possibilities for further expansion of vineyards in the central Okanagan is of great economic but also social interest.

We used a multicriteria analysis in ArcGIS to locate the most suitable areas for vineyards in the central Okanagan. Since the quality of wine is highly dependent on the grapes, and the quality of grapes is influenced by climate, topography and soil, we included these parameters in our analysis. In the selection of suitable sites it was also very important to consider the current land use. To determine the most suitable areas we ranked the climate, topography, soil and land use, so that 9 was given to the most suitable areas while 1 was given to areas that were not suitable at all. Areas not suitable were given a value of 0. In our analysis we considered provincial parks, and residential areas as constraints as well as areas 25 meter away from the major roads, and the areas 50 meters from rivers and lakes. We used seven scenarios with different weightings of climate, topography, soil and land use to determine the influence of different layers. Our final scenario gave us the result that 1.2% of the area (3 172 hectares) can be considered  good for wine-growing, which is 372 hectares larger than the current area of vineyards.