Novelty and Innovative aspects

Innovative pre-operational solutions

The long history of collaboration between research institutions involved in this project and technical operators leaded to the development of several prototypes of pre-operational solutions to rationalize agricultural water use dedicated to the different targeted end-users. The solutions we propose to build on and to extent include:

  • The online tools for irrigation water scheduling “Satellite for Irrigation” or SATIRR (Le Page et al., 2014) that is currently under evaluation with farmers in Morocco, in Spain and in France.
  • The platform for drought monitoring “Mediteranean Drought Index” or MEDI (Le Page et al., 2018). A first version is already adopted by the ONAGRI (National Office of Agriculture in Tunisia).
  • The watershed integrated model SAMIR-WEAP-MODFLOW (Le Page et al., 2012), implemented in the Tensift and Merguellil catchment and adopted by the Hydraulic agency of the Tensift basin in Morocco.
Advance in Earth observation (EO) operational products

Several innovative methodology exploiting EO data developed by the consortium will benefit to the project particularly high to medium scale surface soil moisture products, crop evapotranspiration, health and stress indicators in the view of improving irrigation scheduling, snow cover mapping.

Multi-disciplinary approach

Many projects dealing with the impact of global change on water resources do not really consider the societal, economic and political aspects of the evolution, or represent them in a very crude way. The real challenge in this project is the crossing of human and physical approaches (match objects, methods, time and space scales) through trajectories reconstitutions. Innovation is also expected from the introduction of a social demand dimension in our questioning and multidisciplinary approach.

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