EO-Africa multi-scale smart agricultural water management
EO AFRICA – NATIONAL INCUBATORS
ESA Contract No. 4000139550/22/I-DT
Period: November 2022 – November 2024
Project description:
The AFRI-SMART objective is to investigate how sustainable agriculture can be achieved in the African continent under drought conditions, by co-developing innovative scientific EO-based and state-of-the-art modelling solutions together with African experts increasing their knowledge and capacity, developing an operative platform and database for results visualization and sharing with end-users.
The AFRI-SMART project will tackle this challenge in the Morocco country
Objective 1. EO-based solutions addressing sustainable agriculture and drought monitoring for Morocco:
-estimates of water availability and crop irrigation water needs under a changing climate, at multiple spatial scales at present and forecasted times
– Improvement of water management at national scale for present and forecasted water availability
Objective 2. -Agile development along all project phases to maximize the impacts and to guarantee that the final output is actually responsive to their necessities.
-sharing project approach and activities, defining the output indicators, customizing the web tool, so that their uptake will be easily promoted in the stakeholders’ habits.
-data repository and a web-dahsboard
Objective 3. integrated use of multiple earth observation data with hydrological – crop modeling schemes at different spatial and temporal resolutions (from SMOS soil moisture data to Landsat/ECOSTRESS land surface temperature and Sentinel2 vegetation information)
Results:
- Presentation at the ESA EO for Agriculture under Pressure 2024 Workshop
- Presentation at the ESA EO for AFRICA Symposium 2024
https://eo-4-africa-symposium-2024.esa.int/eo4africa-symposium-re-watch/
(Climate change and adaptation – 1 – at 41:45)
- Policy brief
Web Platform:
Partners:
Politecnico di Milano (Italy) – www.polimi.it
The team, within the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineer, is led by Chiara Corbari. The main research activities are related to water-energy balance modeling combined with remote sensing data and ground measurements for assessing continuous in time evapotranspiration and soil moisture estimates at pixel scale over large agricultural districts and fields. The land surface model has also been used to assess real time and forecasted irrigation water needs and crop yield for improving irrigation water management
University of Southampton (UK) – https://www.southampton.ac.uk/
The team, within the School of Geography and Environmental Science, is led by Justin Sheffield. The group is world leading in research on hydrological monitoring, modelling and prediction including drought forecasting, river flood hydrology, and spatial environmental data analysis, with expertise in applications to agricultural, water resources, and environmental risks, including under climate change.
Chouaib Doukkali University (Morocco) – https://www.ucd.ac.ma/en/
The team, within the Geosciences & Remote Sensing group, is led by Kamal
Labbassi. Their expertise lies in the use of remote sensing data and evapotranspiration modeling for improving irrigation management.
UNESCO Office for the Maghreb (Morocco) – https://www.unesco.org/en/fieldoffice/rabat
The group of the Section des Sciences Exactes et Naturelles, is lead by Mohamed Alaoui. The UNESCO Intergovernmental Hydrological Programme (IHP), founded in 1975 following the International Hydrological Decade (1965-1974), is the only intergovernmental cooperation programme of the UN system dedicated to water research and management, and related education and capacity development. It addresses national, regional, and global water challenges, by supporting the development of sustainable and resilient societies
End-users:
•Ministry of Equipment, Transport, Logistics and Water
•Regional Office of Agricultural Development of Doukkala (ORMVAD)
•Oum Er-Rbia Hydraulic Basin Agency (ABHOER)
•Moroccan Sugar and Refining Company in Doukkala (COSUMAR)
Workshop – Course – November 2023 – Morocco
The AFRI-SMART project team organized an intense week full of discussions on water resources management, smart irrigation, drought, hydrological forecasting and satellite monitoring, after one year from project beginning, from 7th to 10th November 2023. Our team discusseed with students, agency staff and ministry representatives of the water and agricultural sectors in Rabat, Morocco from 7th to 8th November 2023, and then visited the local office of Oum Er-Rbia river basin agency (ABOHER) in Beni Mellal and the agricultural irrigation office of Doukkala in El Jadida (ORMVAD and COSUMAR), on the 9th and 10th November.
The representatives of the Ministries of water and agriculture, and the regional water agencies staff of river basin and irrigation district demonstrated interest in having direct access in quasi-real time to high level information on water resources through a web platform for improving their daily decision-making processes at different spatial scales and decision levels.
Webinar 1: Spatiotemporal analysis of water demand and availability in the Oum Er-Rbia basin
On 1st March 2024, the AFRI-SMART team organized the first online webinar of the project, showing the main scientific achievements. The discussion was centred on the national and basin scale analysis to quantify, in the long term, water availability along the basin river network considering the impacts of droughts. Then the focus shifted to the definition of the irrigation water demand in the Doukkala irrigation district, with higher-resolution analyses merging satellite information and hydrological modelling. Finally, a peek into potential future scenarios of water management was discussed, comparing irrigation water demand with different water availabilities to enforce a sustainable management of the water resource.
Link to access the registration: link
Webinar 2: web-GIS Platform for water management in the Oum Er-Rbia basin
During this second webinar on16th July 2024, the main focus was on the web-GIS platform developed during the project to display and diffuse the models outputs. After a first recap of the modelling approaches behind the displayed information, the platform was described in all its features and some results, concerning the basin and irrigation district scales, were discussed. Both real-time and forecast results were shown, providing some information regarding their characteristics and how to employ them in operational water management within the Oum Er-Rbia basin
Link to access the registration: link
Workshop – Course – October 2024 – Morocco
The International Open Outreach Worshop has been held in Marrakech (Morocco) and online on 7-8th October 2024. We discussed the outcomes and impacts of our project, focusing on water scarcity, drought, irrigation management, hydrological forecasting and satellite monitoring with key stakeholder from river basin agencies, irrigation authorities and ministry representatives in Marrakesh, Morocco. During the workshop the water management tool created in the project was presented. Our visit to the local stakeholders offices for water resources management of ABOHER in Beni Mellal and ORMVAD in El Jadida demonstrated and confirmed the interest and need of monitoring and forecasting operational tools based on EO data, hydrological and meteorological models to improve water management at multiple spatial scales in water scarce area.
Contacts:
If you have any question about AFRI-SMART or to request additional information, please contact us at chiara.corbari@polimi.it
Chiara Corbari (POLIMI) – AFRI-SMART Project Manager
Zoltan Szantoi (ESA) – AFRI-SMART Project Officer