Articles
Application of digital twins for upscaling irrigation management from farms to communities of several thousand irrigated plots
Article number
1468_57
Pages
443 – 450
Language
English
Abstract
Data-driven irrigation management is key to maintain agricultural production in water-scarce scenarios and to ensure farm resilience to drought.
Moreover, agricultural water management can involve coordination at different levels of operation: farm and communities embracing a large collection of farms.
These may be irrigation districts that manage water distribution to the farms or cooperatives that enforce a shared strategy on water use efficiency.
The emerging paradigm of digital twins (DT) emphasizes the combination of different monitoring technologies with real-time simulations and decision making, being particularly suitable for the representation of large systems composed of smaller systems (System of Systems, SoS). Beyond their application to irrigation scheduling in farms, DT can also be applied to districts, where support tools can use the approaches of DT and SoS to offer two types of coordinated functionalities.
On the one hand, provide farmers with updated plot-specific irrigation prescriptions.
On the other hand, provide district managers with forecasts of aggregated water demand.
In this context, Irridesk.district has been developed to support coordinated irrigation management between farmers and water managers.
It works by continuously simulating, at real time throughout the irrigation season, the water dynamics in the soil-plant-atmosphere system, along with the crop development in each of the plots that make up a district.
Simulations follow a similar rationale to FAO’s Aquacrop, but with adaptations to also include woody crops and drip irrigation.
Additionally, it updates weather data online and assimilates into the DT models the vegetative vigor (FAPAR) calculated from satellite Earth Observation (Sentinel-2) when new images become available on the ESA Hub.
Optionally, it can integrate data from water meters and soil moisture sensors, which are primarily used to validate and calibrate the simulations.
Thus, for each plot in the district, it provides a representation of soil water dynamics, crop evapotranspiration, potential yield, recommended plot irrigation, and the necessary water catchment to meet these needs.
This contribution exposes the rationale and application to several districts and cooperatives.
Moreover, agricultural water management can involve coordination at different levels of operation: farm and communities embracing a large collection of farms.
These may be irrigation districts that manage water distribution to the farms or cooperatives that enforce a shared strategy on water use efficiency.
The emerging paradigm of digital twins (DT) emphasizes the combination of different monitoring technologies with real-time simulations and decision making, being particularly suitable for the representation of large systems composed of smaller systems (System of Systems, SoS). Beyond their application to irrigation scheduling in farms, DT can also be applied to districts, where support tools can use the approaches of DT and SoS to offer two types of coordinated functionalities.
On the one hand, provide farmers with updated plot-specific irrigation prescriptions.
On the other hand, provide district managers with forecasts of aggregated water demand.
In this context, Irridesk.district has been developed to support coordinated irrigation management between farmers and water managers.
It works by continuously simulating, at real time throughout the irrigation season, the water dynamics in the soil-plant-atmosphere system, along with the crop development in each of the plots that make up a district.
Simulations follow a similar rationale to FAO’s Aquacrop, but with adaptations to also include woody crops and drip irrigation.
Additionally, it updates weather data online and assimilates into the DT models the vegetative vigor (FAPAR) calculated from satellite Earth Observation (Sentinel-2) when new images become available on the ESA Hub.
Optionally, it can integrate data from water meters and soil moisture sensors, which are primarily used to validate and calibrate the simulations.
Thus, for each plot in the district, it provides a representation of soil water dynamics, crop evapotranspiration, potential yield, recommended plot irrigation, and the necessary water catchment to meet these needs.
This contribution exposes the rationale and application to several districts and cooperatives.
Authors
J. Casadesús, S. Serrano, J. Oliver-Manera, F. Camps, J. Bellvert
Keywords
crop modeling, DSS, IoT sensors, irrigation scheduling, remote sensing
Groups involved
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