Co-production of a remote-sensing based approach for small agricultural reservoirs management in a Mediterranean watershed

Small Agricultural Reservoirs (SmARs) are important agricultural drought adaptation measures. However, the monitoring and the management of SmARs is a challenging task in several areas of the Mediterranean, given the limited amount of information and support systems available for such relatively small structures. Recent national-scale mapping in Italy, developed within the CASTLE PRIN project – Creating Agricultural reSilience Through smaLl rEservoirs (https://sites.google.com/view/castleita/home-page), demonstrated the potential of satellite data to identify SmARs systematically. Following these efforts, within the Val D’Orcia Living Lab (https://agwamed.eu/italy-val-dorcia) of the University of Florence, we develop a co-production approach with local stakeholders to create a remote-sensing-based Decision Support System (DSS) for managing water resources in SmARs.

The Orcia watershed - a UNESCO World Heritage Site - is situated in Tuscany, Central Italy. It is morphologically characterized by a succession of hills composed of Pliocene clay, characterized by deep incisions of the courses of gullies and erosive formations typically associated with clay substrates. The soil is intensely cultivated in wide agricultural parcels characterized by simple arable land with sporadic tree crops (olive groves and vineyards) on the highest areas and near the major settlements, with a typical Mediterranean setting. The area is mainly characterized by rainfed agriculture but, in the last decades, farmers increasingly resorted to supplementary irrigation during summer. 

The proposed approach takes advantage of a variety of remote sensing products to analyze the dynamics of emptying and filling SmAR in the area through the analysis of the reservoir area, using  Stage-area-volume (SAV) curves derived from water-borne drone surveys in  the case study and on-site monitoring of water levels. The scale of approach (farm- or watershed-scale) and the findings are validated in participatory meetings at the Living Lab to ensure the developed system meets local needs for water resources monitoring and drought management. The impacts and the possibility of detecting loss of storage volume due to sedimentation are also discussed. The resulting framework can enable the development of cost-effective and scalable tools, ensuring economic sustainability and practical applicability for farm-level and watershed-scale water management. The proposed approach can be out-scaled in other areas of the Mediterranean and further developed for similar water harvesting structures.

 

This research was partly carried out within the projects: 

• AG-WaMED Project (CUP B53C22004860003), funded by the Partnership for Research and Innovation in the Mediterranean Area Programme (PRIMA), an Art.185 initiative supported and funded under Horizon 2020, the European Union's Framework Programme for Research and Innovation, Grant Agreement Number [Italy: 391 del 20/10/2022, Egypt: 45878, Tunisia: 0005874-004-18-2022-3, Greece: ΓΓP21-0474657, Spain: PCI2022-132929, Algeria: N° 04/PRIMA_section 2/2021]
• “Space It Up!” (call ASI n. 687/2022 of 26 July 2022, contract ASI N. 2024-5-E.0, master code: I53D24000060005, WP 7.6), funded by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MUR)
• CASTLE project, European Union Next-GenerationEU (National Recovery and Resilience Plan – NRRP, Mission 4, Component 2, Investment 1.1 – D.D. n. 104 02/02/2022 PRIN 2022 project code MUR 2022XSERL4 - CUP D53D23004920006