Please join us for the weekly BAE seminar 

Tuesday, October 7th 
1-2 pm, 2045 BAINER HALL 

Topic: Improving Irrigation at the Farm Level: An Overview of the European Union Project "FIGARO" 

Presenter: Raphael Linker 
Division of Environmental, Water and Agricultural Engineering 
Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering 
Technion 
Haifa, Israel 

Abstract 
Water is a limited resource, which is now under unprecedented pressure due to global population growth and climate change. Irrigated agriculture is one of the major water-consuming sectors and has been identified by the European Union as a sector in which substantial water savings could be achieved. 
The objective of the FIGARO project is to reduce significantly the use of fresh water at the farm level through the development of a cost-effective management platform for precise irrigation. The platform combines data acquisition from monitoring devices and forecasting tools, data interpretation, system control, and evaluation mechanisms enabling full decision support for end-users. More specifically, the platform merges new and existing crop models, soil sensors, weather forecasting tools, ICT control systems, ground-based and airborne remote sensing technologies, and GIS tools to provide the farmer with the optimum irrigation protocol to be implemented in the field at any point in time. 

Following an overview of the whole project, the talk will present in more details one of the approaches currently being investigated for the design of the Decision Support System (DSS) which is a key component of the platform and is responsible, at any point during the season, for determining in real-time the optimal irrigation protocol taking into account all the information available at that point in time. 

Coffee and cookies will be served.