Managing Water in Agriculture through Remote Sensing and WebGIS Applications

The climatic factors and their variability, both spatial and temporal, linked to precipitation decreasing and irregular distribution, due to climatic changes, have been gathering a higher weight in the definition of water management policies. These policies have important implications on agriculture.

Using new technologies that allow a better use of water requires institutional changes in major areas. The first point is the need for base information with an adequate spatial and temporal resolution. The work we have done includes itself in the water efficient and sustained use, allowing the improvement of irrigation systems and it’s the result of a jointly effort of several teams based on an international project.

The PLEIADES Project - Participatory multi-Level EO-assisted tools for Irrigation water management: and Agricultural Decision - Support, falls in the 6º Framework Programme, Priority 6 - Sustainable Development, Global Change and Ecosystems – CEC - Research Directorate-General-Integrating and Strengthening the European Research Area. The Portuguese working area was the Caia irrigation area, a subsystem of Guadiana basin, located in the southeast of Portugal, near the border with Spain.

The system praised by PLEIADES stands mainly over FAO normative, about culture water needs and the calculation of cultural coefficient (KC) in a simple way, directly from remote sensing data. For that we simply use radiometric parameters derived from visible and infrared bands.

Beyond the use of GIS and WebGIS, the knowledge of diferent cultures development and it’s diferents phenologic characteristics are an added value of the project. The WebGIS allows users to access medium resolution satellite data (LANDSAT, SPOT), in order to get data with a spatial and temporal resolution adjusted to the characteristics of the study area and to the farmers needs.

Results show that for normal day tasks, the implementation of a irrigation warning system based in orbital data has substantial improvements in comparison with the traditional systems.