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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - MOSES (Managing crOp water Saving with Enterprise Services)

Teaser

The project aimed at providing an integrated and innovative water management solution to individual and collective actors of irrigated agriculture. These priorities are in line with the goals of the European Innovation Partnerships (EIP) on Water, one of the five partnerships...

Summary

The project aimed at providing an integrated and innovative water management solution to individual and collective actors of irrigated agriculture. These priorities are in line with the goals of the European Innovation Partnerships (EIP) on Water, one of the five partnerships within the EU 2020 Innovation Union.
The objective of MOSES was to put in place and demonstrate at the real scale of application an information platform targeting mainly the needs of water procurement and management agencies (e.g. reclamation consortia, irrigation districts, etc.) to facilitate planning of irrigation water resources, as well as services to farmers to support efforts to reduce water use, monetary and energy costs.

Main supported services are:

1. early-season irrigated crop mapping
2. seasonal weather forecasting and downscaling
3. in-season monitoring of crop water requirements and soil water balance;
4. medium and short term crop water demand and irrigation forecasting

The project is active in four different Demonstration Areas (DAs): in the DA set up in Italy, the project was applied in the first 18 months of activities. The other three DAs were set up in Spain, Romania and Morocco, representing different water procurement and distribution scenarios to obtain a wider service definition.

The MOSES platform was implemented as planned and in addition new functionalities were added to respond to specific needs emerging from the experience gained with the application in the four DA-s. The platform offers multiple and complementary information services through a continuous data flow, with intuitive access and flexible operation. In response to user feedback the original design based on smallest spatial elements, applied to model soil water balance, defined by cadastral boundaries, was improved to model elementary units adaptable to different irrigation management units. This led to generate information fitting easily into the current irrigation management systems.

At the end of the project, it appears feasible to continue MOSES operations by hosting the platform on one of the cloud–based DIAS platforms under development in response to an initiative of the European Space Agency (ESA). (Fig. 1)

Work performed

The work performed from the beginning of the project is briefly described below.

Requirements definition. The Information requirements in all the demonstration areas have been collected (by questionnaires, mail exchanges, web-based meetings) during project preparation and in the initial stages of the project. The analysis of the requirements led to identify:
- Hierarchical Management Levels
- Water management operations
- Information products, their timing, spatial and temporal resolution

An example for the Moroccan Demonstration Area is shown in Figure 2.

Design. The platform is an ensemble of seven macro-modules (Satellite Data Download, Early Crop Mapping, Unit Crop Mapping, In-Season Crop Mapping, Crop Water Demand, Irrigation Forecast and Seasonal Forecast processors), integrated in a processing chain (Fig.3). The design has been derived from requirements and the modules implement the information products in the blue blocks of Figure 2.

Service definition. In the first part of the project, MOSES services were defined on the basis of the requirements analysis. Successively, service definition was extended by defining specific KPI-s and organizing a campaign to measure the KPI-s.

Life-Cycle Assessment Analysis. LCA was comparatively applied to a situation with and without the MOSES services. Comparison was done developing specific simulation models to set and analyze different scenarios. This assessment was based on hypothetical impacts, i.e. what is expected to happen if the WA chooses to drive his strategic decision, following the information provided by the MOSES platform.

Communication, Dissemination and Impact. These activities were divided into three components:
● Communication
● Market and Business Analysis and Impact Analysis
● MOSES Exploitation Platform

The Communication activities started by designing a logo and templates. Up to date information on the project and its progress was disseminated through the project website and all social media as Twitter (https://twitter.com/MOSES_H2020), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/mosesproject/?hl=it) and LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/groups/8469752).
Dissemination events were selected by the Management Team with all partners.
Presentations on the project have been given at events targeting a broad audience as well as EU events. Communication materials, such as rollup-s and flyers, have been produced to strengthen the MOSES brand.

Currently the platform is available at https://moses.esriitalia.it/portal, and a Web-GIS viewer is available at https://moses.esriitalia.it/portal/home/signin.html?returnUrl=https%3A//moses.esriitalia.it/mosesviewer_rc_en/

Final results

MOSES services are a major step forward compared with state-of-the-art Decision Support Systems for irrigation water management based on satellites data usage as such services normally provide Near Real Time (NRT) information on crop conditions derived by multi–spectral image data, whereas MOSES platform provides both monitoring and forecasts at two time scales, i.e. seasonal and daily to address both planning and operation of water availability and allocation. Moreover, the MOSES information products are generated at high spatial resolution to support on–farm irrigation management and are aggregated to larger spatial units to support water management within entire irrigation schemes. Limited but significant adaptations of information products have guaranteed the best feasible match to expectations and current water management practices in each DA.
Project outcome are summarized below.
MOSES data products meet demand. There is a generic interest for better management to improve efficiency although water stocks in reservoirs and flows in canals are main focus.
Actual irrigation water volumes data available are rather heterogeneous, making the evaluation of CWD metrics rather complex.
MOSES services evaluation was carried out in the DA–IT and DA–SP, mainly by comparing CWD metrics with (metered) data on actual irrigation volumes, suggesting a moderate yet significant “room for improvement”. (Fig. 4-5)
In the DA–MO the analyses show how relevant seasonal and in–season information services are (in principle). In the DA–RO droughts lead to restrictions on water delivery and yield losses, suggesting MOSES high potential. (Fig. 6-7)
There was a clear interest in the MOSES monitoring of crop area, water demand and phenological status.