<p>COALA is a project funded by the Horizon 2020 program of the European Union with the aim of developing Copernicus Earth Observation-based information services for irrigation and nutrient management in Australia, building on consolidated experience of past EU projects and existing operational irrigation advisory services. Earth Observation-based services can provide “diagnostic” data and information relevant for integrated input management of irrigation water and nutrients, from subplot level to irrigation scheme or river basin levels.</p><p>COALA, started on January 2020, is developing Copernicus-based information service for the Australian agricultural systems, based on strong collaboration with Academic Australian institutions and business players. COALA services will provide to farmers, irrigation organisation and basin authorities information about crops development, water and nutrient status, irrigated areas by means of innovative algorithms based on Sentinel Earth Observation data, which will be accessed by means of the new cloud platforms (DIAS) of Copernicus. In-situ and other source of data, such as ground soil moisture probes, meteorological stations and Numerical Weather Prediction models, will be used to improve the information provided to the final users.</p><p>The advancements beyond the state of art of COALA methodologies for managing irrigation are:</p><p>COALA will demonstrate that Copernicus data and new DIAS infrastructure can greatly improve the availability of a multi-scale information product shared by the different levels of users. The innovative approach achieves a "converging loop procedure" between water authority, irrigation infrastructure operation and farmers, enabling transparency in all the decision taken at all levels and improving the accuracy of estimation of actual water use.</p><p><strong>https://www.coalaproject.eu/</strong></p>

SUMMARYIn addition to reducing global water availability unauthorized irrigation and over-consumption can have social consequences in terms of conflicting water use. In its Water Framework Directive, the European Union (EU) has outlined an agenda for future water policy, emphasizing that, to ensure a sustainable use of water resources, these practices should be strongly opposed. In order to address this problem efficiently, water managers need to map irrigated area, plan the rational use of water resources under limited availability, and prevent unauthorized irrigation. We are currently developing an innovative system to do this based on a series of multi-spectral satellite acquisitions from two sensors having different spatial and temporal resolutions (DEIMOS, Rapid Eye). In this system, the irrigated area is identified based on temporal pattern recognition, exploiting the differing developmental rates between irrigated and not irrigated crops. This method was applied in the district of Consorzio Sannio Alifano, located in Southern Italy, where irrigation is required for most crops including corn, alfalfa, fruit trees and vegetables. An accuracy assessment of the methodology has been performed and has demonstrated positive results of this approach. Future system upgrades will exploit information derived from shortwave infrared data obtained using of the newly developed Sentinel-2 sensor. The approach described herein is the technological basis of a recently-funded EU H2020 project, named Detection and Integrated Assessment of Non-authorised water Abstractions using Earth Observation or DIANA.