HidroMap: A New Tool for Irrigation Monitoring and Management Using Free Satellite Imagery

Abstract

Proper control and planning of water resource use, especially in those catchments with large surface, climatic variability and intensive irrigation activity, is essential for a sustainable water management. Decision support systems based on useful tools involving main stakeholders and hydrological planning offices of the river basins play a key role. The free availability of Earth observation products with high temporal resolution, such as the European Sentinel-2B, has allowed us to combine remote sensing with cadastral and agronomic data. This paper introduces HidroMap to the scientific community, an open source tool as a geographic information system (GIS) organized in two different modules, desktop-GIS and web-GIS, with complementary functions and based on PostgreSQL/PostGIS database. Through an effective methodology HidroMap allows monitoring irrigation activity, managing unregulated irrigation, and optimizing available fluvial surveillance resources using satellite imagery. This is possible thanks to the automatic download, processing and storage of satellite products within field data provided by the River Surveillance Agency (RSA) and the Hydrological Planning Office (HPO). The tool was successfully validated in Duero Hydrographic Basin along the 2017 summer irrigation period. In conclusion, HidroMap comprised an important support tool for water management tasks and decision making tackled by Duero Hydrographic Confederation which can be adapted to any additional need and transferred to other river basin organizations.

Monitoring Green Infrastructure for Natural Water Retention Using Copernicus Global Land Products

“…For instance, NDVI is the most successfully used index, not only for the monitoring of agriculture and forest NWRMs but also for NWRM-related biophysical impacts. This is partly to be expected, given that this well-known parameter has actually been the most widely used vegetation index for decades, especially for monitoring vegetation health and growth [33,36,72,73], and hence an extensive scientific literature employing NDVI exists, starting from its first use in 1973 [74]. According to the reviewed articles, LAI also stands out as one of the most suitable indices for the monitoring of both agriculture NWRMs and "direct" biophysical impacts (slowing and storing run-off and reducing run-off), while TOCR is the following most used index in both categories (Figures 4 and A8 in Appendix B).…”

“…Focusing on CGLS vegetation products (as of November 2018), the widely-used normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) gives an indication of the current greenness of the natural surface [33,36]. Derived from this index are the VCI and VPI (vegetation condition and productivity indices; the latter has now been discontinued), which compare measured NDVI values respectively to its long-term average and to its historical maximum and minimum.…”

“…Such data, especially when freely available, up-to-date and in near-real-time, shows great potential, considering the constant changes undergone by Earth's ecosystems due to natural land and atmospheric conditions and under the pressure of human activities [31][32][33]. Its applications include the parametrization of a wide variety of ecosystem models, the reproduction of ecosystem dynamics, and the estimation of natural risks to ecosystems or future scenarios, which can improve the formulation of environmental and conservation policies [34][35][36].…”

“…In order to monitor and manage ecosystem changes, scientists have developed, in the framework of remote sensing applications, highly useful indices and approaches for evaluating both qualitatively and quantitatively the vegetative-water-energy nexus of natural surfaces through the execution of spectral measurements [33,34,[36][37][38][39]. The worldwide known Copernicus Global Land Service (CGLS) [40], a component of the Land Monitoring Core Service of the Copernicus Earth Observation program, provides in particular a freely-available set of products based on qualified bio-geophysical indices.…”

Assessment of Green Infrastructure in Riparian Zones Using Copernicus Programme

“…Moreover, S2 data has been used due to its high spatial resolution to overcome this weakness of the bio-geophysical indices offered in the CLMS [49]. The goal was to determine and evaluate ES condition indicators specified in the reviewed frameworks, such as the greening response and water stress [39], using indices that can be related to vegetation biophysical characteristics, like the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) [50][51][52][53].…”