Sensors and IRRINET: integration of information from weather station networks and private sensors with the IRRINET water balance model.
In order to cope with the periods of increasing drought that have been occurring during the irrigation season for some years now, the Consortia of the Emilia-Romagna Region have equipped themselves with the IRRINET service, a technical assistance system for water saving implemented by the ERC. It is a precise system that draws up irrigation recommendations based on a series of data and provides them to agricultural producers. Producer organisations (POs) and farms have shown increasing interest in finding a solution to the lack of integration and usability in the acquisition and processing of environmental data.
The intervention funded the extension and integration of technologies to the IRRINET system. IRRINET was connected to weather and soil moisture sensors on the farms concerned. The integration of soil-crop-climate sensors with the regional irrigation management system IRRINET, tells the farmer when and how much to irrigate, making it possible to benefit from greater reliability of the data collected, to improve the usability of site-specific information, but above all to automate interaction with the portal. In addition to this, the implementation activities of the IRRINET system allow the identification of areas in the region where the densification of the network could improve the representativeness of the measured climatic parameters.
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