Collaborative project: GPS- and server-based irrigation management for vegetable crops using climatic water balance (GS-Mobil) - subproject 1 | FISA - Forschungsinformationssystem Agrar und Ernährung

Collaborative project: GPS- and server-based irrigation management for vegetable crops using climatic water balance (GS-Mobil) - subproject 1

Project

Project code: 2815500111
Contract period: 01.10.2012 - 30.09.2015
Budget: 242,586 Euro
Purpose of research: Applied research

The aim of this project is to create a system for irrigation scheduling, which is based on the state-of-the-art of science and technology. This system focuses on determining the water demand of vegetable crops precisely, easily and in real time by combining climatic water balance with GPS and smartphone technique. The benefits are increased water use efficiency, a reduction of nitrate leaching into the groundwater and saving of working time for irrigation scheduling. The higher acceptance of this system compared to the established ones will be due to the minimized data input by the user, the automated acquisitions of meteorological data and information about proximate irrigation via app. The availability of information is expected to be elevated and the management of irrigation technique to be optimized. The new system can be embedded into precision farming. The Geisenheim Research Center will model crop coefficients (kc) with temperature-sums and evaluate model parameters for climatic water balance (CWB) in open field trials over a period of three years. The DWD calculates the CWB via modeled kc and gridded meteorological data. HELM will configure a communication server, which receives the irrigation advices from DWD, transmits these to the app and documents irrigation processings. Via smartphone, the user retransfers information about the kind of crop, irrigation quantities and soil type to the communication server. In 2015, the system will be tested in open field trials.

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