from the plot to the river basin - agrisatwebgis®: a tool for efficient water management

The rigorous management of water in agriculture must be seen from the point of view of all its actors, covering the information and knowledge needs of each one of them: from supporting the farmer in making irrigation decisions at the foot of the plot, until the collection and management of objective information at the basin level, through planning and control at the level of user communities. Today it is not conceived to address this enormous task without resorting to the available technological arsenal, but to speak of complex technologies is to speak of a high degree of specialization that escapes individual capacities. In this context, successful solutions arise from cooperation between entities of different nature. An example of this is the collaboration between the Remote Sensing Section and GIS of the University of Castilla La Mancha and the company AgriSat Iberia SL, which have created a dynamic of continuous innovation work to, firstly, transfer complex knowledge in format to the farmer of simple services of direct application, later, with the information generated at the intraparcel level, to scale to the level required by the entities or authorities involved in water governance, and finally, to redirect efforts and resources in research, development and innovation from of a better knowledge of their perception, degree of adoption and suggestions for improvement in this regard.

The last result of this fruitful collaboration has been the development of an application that integrates information on the state of the crops, from satellite images, to predict reliably and at an intraparcel scale (with a resolution level of 100 m²) your needs water a week seen. This allows quantifying, at any moment of the crop cycle, its accumulated demand for water, and adding it spatially to the exploitation level, of the irrigation community or of the river basin. From the estimation of the relative photosynthetic activity obtained from the images, it is possible to know the evolution of the crops throughout their growth and development cycle, as well as their spatial variability, in a simple and intuitive way.

There are three technologies that jointly facilitate this important leap in water management: remote sensing, geographic information systems (GIS), and information and communication technologies (ICT).

Its online character makes it a service accessible from anywhere with data connection, and in turn makes it a “live” system not only for its capacity for functional expansion but for the possibility of increasing the quantity and quality of the sources of information, allowing access to each new improvement immediately.