Irrigation management from space: Towards user-friendly products

Irrigation Advisory Services (IAS) are the natural management instruments to achieve a better efficiency in the use of water for irrigation. IAS provide the farmers with irrigation scheduling information, based on crop water requirements for different crops, and thus, help farmers to optimise production and cost-effectiveness. Current IAS rely on labour- and cost-intensive field work, yet are unable to cover each plot in large areas at regular short time intervals. Earth observation (EO) is naturally destined to fill this gap. It allows for efficiently monitoring crop water requirements and related parameters within each field in extended areas. The incorporation of IT in the generation and distribution of information makes that information easily available to IAS and to its associated farmers in a personalised way. Farmers can opt to receive a wide variety of products, tailored to their needs and infrastructure, ranging from simple irrigation scheduling recommendation (irrigation volume, time) to colour-coded images (providing quick intuitive information on the crop vigour within their plots), both on PC and/or mobile phones. This work is based on the project DEMETER (DEMonstration of Earth observation TEchnologies in Routine irrigation advisory services), which assesses and demonstrates the EO- and IT-induced improvements in IAS day-to-day operations. This paper describes the methodology and discusses examples of products.