Mapping Australia’s tree crop industries

The Australian Tree Crop Map was first imagined in 2014 when a number of tree crop industries approached the Applied Agricultural Remote Sensing Centre (AARSC) to see whether remote sensing technology could be used to estimate the size of their respective production areas.

Through Hort Innovation, the ‘Multi‑scale monitoring tools for managing Australian tree crops’ project was established with support from the Australian Government Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry as part of its Rural R&D for Profit program.

The project was led by the University of England, including four industries, researchers and commercial entities who joined forces to address a number of common issues. These included the national mapping of all commercial orchards to better understand industry size and annual change, as well as identifying emerging technologies that offered improved measures of tree health and yield forecasting.

In 2017, the AARSC mapping team led by Craig Shephard, delivered the first Australian Tree Crop Map (ATCM).

“Industry were seeking scientific evidence on the current size and location of their orchards to understand actual area of production. Until then, estimates were based on other “non‑spatial” data and there was uncertainty regarding how big these industries were and more importantly where the orchards were,” Craig said.

“No one had mapped tree crops at commodity level at national scale. The challenge in building an accurate map is classifying them from one another— they all look alike from a satellite!”

By incorporating existing industry data, citizen science, government land use information, remote sensing analytics and extensive ground truthing, the ATCM set a new global standard for land use mapping of agriculture at individual commodity level. Not only did the map provide a more accurate measure of the size and distribution of Australia’s avocado, macadamia and mango industries, it was also applied as a valuable tool for biosecurity preparedness and responding to natural disasters.

Craig said the key to success in building these maps was the level of engagement from industry.

“We established a ‘citizen-science’ approach where anyone could review and contribute to the map, which has proven very effective at gathering additional data, particularly for discerning which crop is which. We also encourage growers to let us know if they are planting a new orchard so that we can update the map. It’s essential for mapping new plantings which cannot be accurately mapped with satellite imagery alone.”

The successful development and adoption of the ATCM stimulated significant interest from other industries and initiated a second phase of the project in 2019 that saw the inclusion of banana plantations, citrus orchards and olive groves in the map. The updated ATCM (published in 2022) included more detail with a minimum mapping unit of 1 hectare.

As a measure of success, the ATCM dashboard has been adopted by each industry as their main collation point of orchard locations (hosted on each respective industry body websites); it was awarded the best international dashboard at the 2022 International Esri conference in San Diego (70,000 delegates); the ATCM is now the main data source for the Australian Bureau of Statistics and ABARES census; the map layer has also been used by the Murray Darling Basin Commission and Harvest Trail.

In addition, there have been many practical applications of the map, including industry biosecurity preparedness and incursions such as Varroa Mite and Panama Tropical Race 4.

Craig said a highlight was how the map addressed a water security issue in relation to Paradise Dam.

“When a Queensland government proposal to lower the Paradise Dam wall on the Burnett River came to light, the map was instrumental in informing industry’s response and subsequent legal actions by showing the current area of production within the Bundaberg irrigation supply area, that would have been affected by lowering the dam wall.”

An ongoing highlight for Craig has been how the map has been used to estimate the impact of severe weather events.

“As we speak, another tropical cyclone is forming in the Coral Sea, so AARSC are currently capturing that data which will be analysed and published into our Severe Weather App in near-real time. Potential impact areas to tree crops are summarised within the wind zones, which will inform the response by industry for impacted growers.”

Craig and the AARSC mapping team are looking forward to what the next five years of further developing the map will bring.

“In this next phase, we will be making a significant expansion to the data and insights available about avocado, banana, citrus and macadamia crops in Australia. This involves adding data like planting year, variety, and land management.

“The end goal is two mapping products—one that is secured for access by industry only that contains commercial information, and the second as the Australian Tree Crop Map, which remains a publicly-available dataset that shows just the location and extent of tree crops.”

Readers are encouraged to view the ATCM and a range of additional theme-based mapping applications which support it at www.une.edu.au/webapps.