Precise Irrigation and Smart Water Resources Management

Objectives:

With climate change and Water scarcity, countries' policy aims to conserve dams’ water for domestic and industrial use only. It is common to see all along the wadis or rivers, small plantations pumping surface water for farming needs. With cities expansion neighboring watersheds wadis, and rivers receive different types of wastewater discharge. Due to a lack of budget. Having no other alternative, rural economies and smallholder communities turn to the use of non-conventional irrigation. This project describes a system to monitor water quality and its evolution to manage an innovative irrigation process dedicated to small farms, livestock, and seasonal agricultural production.

Innovative low-cost technological tools can be used to address water scarcity in support of the circular economy as:

• Optimized irrigation management for increasing water productivity.
• Remote sensing to track over time livestock activities, and unsustainable exploitation of rangelands.
• Integrated remote-controlled Water monitoring.

Many sensor nodes can be used on multiple crops to share a single display and control Terminal. Communication between nodes and the control node is based on SPE to avoid water perturbations on wireless systems.

The proposed solution allows remote measurements of several water physicochemical parameters, and soil moisture to help crops and livestock activities. We are using two connected nodes one for water quality and soil moisture and the other for local display and remote connection (see figure-1).

Sparkfun Micromod Single pair Ethernet tools are proposed as the technological tool to address project objectives. We are demonstrating a prototype with two nodes. The first one is for water quality, soil parameters, and ambient atmosphere parameters. The second is for crop watering, data acquisition, and web exchange.

Water Quality node:

Water from wadis and rivers is one of the main sources for the different population needs, notably irrigation. On the other hand, these sources of water can contain several organic, mineral, and solid substances, which must be predicted before any domestic use or reuse for agricultural and livestock purposes. Up-to-date standards have experienced an evolution marked by increased severity and an extension of the number of physicochemical parameters measured. This is to ensure health protection for the population as well as environmental sustainability.

We are using Analog Device CN0411 (figure-2) to measure Total Dissolved Solids and water conductivity. These parameters are important to estimate and build models for water physical and chemical structures.

We have added to this node soil moisture, ambient temperature and humidity, all connected to a single Micromode Sparkfun board through the QWIIC bus (figure-3). Since it is QWIIC those parameters can be moved to another node.

Terminal node:

We are proposing to use the SPE to collect data that can help to build AI models, such as low-altitude remote sensing to estimate the size of livestock herds occupying the concerned pastoral region. This will open the way for herd movement management and optimization. We are also using the light sensor on the Wio Terminal for water quality control. Indeed, adequate water quality control prevents the spread of waterborne pathogens, tracks contamination, and identifies its sources as soon as the first signs emerge.

Conclusion

This project will provide low-cost innovative technological tools in order to introduce new sustainable integrated developments in the management of water resources under climate change conditions.

Expected outputs from this project that fulfill this call thematic area are:

• Enhanced knowledge about pollution sources and processes in order to attenuate the impact of anthropogenic activities on water resource availability and quality.
• Water scarcity management is supported by forecasting systems that monitor the anthropogenic impact on the integrated water cycle;
• optimized balance between soil evaporation and plant transpiration to improve plant water status and soil/water productivity;
• Decision support systems based on cost-effective devices and sensors for irrigation under water quality/quantity constraints;
• Water treatment technology for specific irrigation requirements (e.g., precision irrigation);

innovative and adapted technologies are used to enable new governance models and cope with climate change adaptation. Remote regions, exclusively in drought or epidemic periods, are the ones that benefit most from this solution.