A new paper has been published in Hydrology Research and is now online.
Title: From (cyber)space to ground: new technologies for smart farming
Abstract: Increased water demand and climate change impacts have recently enhanced the need to improve
water resources management, even in those areas which traditionally have an abundant supply of
water, such as the Po Valley in northern Italy. The highest consumption of water is devoted to
irrigation for agricultural production, and so it is in this area that efforts have to be focused to study
possible interventions. Meeting and optimizing the consumption of water for irrigation also means
making more resources available for drinking water and industrial use, and maintaining an optimal
state of the environment. In this study we show the effectiveness of the combined use of numerical
weather predictions and hydrological modelling to forecast soil moisture and crop water requirement
in order to optimize irrigation scheduling. This system combines state of the art mathematical
models and new technologies for environmental monitoring, merging ground observed data with
Earth observations from space and unconventional information from the cyberspace through
crowdsourcing.
New technologies for smart farming by Giovanni Ravazzani is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.