Utilizing 3-D software for land use planning

In the world of wine almost nothing appeals more to snobs than location. Is it a French or Italian wine? A wine from Burgundy or Bordeaux? Did it come from the châteaux of the Rothschilds or the more plebeian land bisected by Ontario's Cattail Creek?

A uniquely Ontario locational element is about to be added to this frenetic pinpointing - the Vineyard Engine. It brings wine specificity down to its most basic level. "A vineyard can have 50,000 vines, and we are capable of putting together a database for each of those vines individually," says Marti Jurmain, director of research and innovation at Niagara College's Niagara-on-the-Lake campus.

Sensors, including the Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and geographic information systems (GIS), allow all the things related to a vineyard - soil type, yield volumes, sunlight, wind, temperature, drainage and more than a dozen other properties - to flow into a database. Viticulturists can then theoretically treat each vine differently and produce an individual bottle of wine the provenance of which is tied to unique, and possibly stellar, vine-by-vine growing conditions.

According to Jurmain, vineyard owners today are monitoring so-called sentinel vines, the grapes often found at the end of a row. They are using this information to create different vintages from grapes growing in the same field. Indeed, a version of the monitoring system and database has already been used to produce three different types of Riesling in a single Ontario vineyard.

If all this sounds like visions from an oenophile's heaven, you may have missed what is quite possibly the most striking thing about the data-gathering and simulation system that Niagara is using as part of its wider farmer's field mapping effort known as the PrAgMatic Project.

It is the fruit of an initial failure and, in so being, reflects how Niagara has been using missteps as a way of changing, sometimes dramatically, the applications of its research.

Before considering the Vineyard Engine, Niagara students and teachers had been developing 3-D software to simulate what would happen to automotive traffic flow when changes of various sorts occurred.

They succeeded in creating a package that could visualize traffic in real-world, real-time simulations. "But when it was mostly completed and we went out to major engineering firms, we found that because of the complexity of modelling and the time it took to create a model, our product just wasn't saleable," says Michael Duncan, the principal investigator on the project.

But upon reflecting what they could do, Duncan and others realized that the traffic jams they had modelled were not unlike very slow-growing vines or other crops. This meant, in theory, that one could transfer the software from helping move congested cars to day-to-day field management.

This is the second time the Niagara group turned success into failure. Its original funding aimed to create 3-D virtual reality software to aid local manufacturers in designing machinery and other products.

But they found the market wasn't there.

So they looked around and noticed that there appeared to be a singular lack of 3-D visualizations that were being used for land use planning efforts in the region. They realized their manufacturing software could be modified to perform this exact task.

That reconfiguration of applied research eventually would lead to the establishment of Niagara College's Centre for Advanced Visualization, a spinoff company specializing in land use visualization.

The college's success has translated into it becoming a major training centre for student research assistants - 150 students a year now go through a research training program - and a life lesson for the researchers involved.

"What we have learned is something organic," says Jurmain. "Things evolve. Things move on."

Then Duncan adds, "Our original research plan and most of our original ideas and technology are still in play. They've adapted and changed, but they're still us. It's like you might not recognize the dinosaurs because they look like birds now, but the basic dinosaur concept hasn't become extinct."