The DigitalRiego project, a collaborative project coordinated by the Desertification Research Centre (CSIC-UV-GVA) and involving AINIA, the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), Asdrón Spain (ASDRON), the Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Agrarias (IVIA) and the Cooperativa de Anecoop S. Coop.

With the aim of optimising the efficiency of water use in plots through the adoption of agronomic strategies, DigitalRiego has developed a model for estimating the water requirements of both horticultural and woody crops, integrating multiscale information obtained with Lidar, multispectral, thermal and hyperspectral sensors. The model thus developed can be applied for different irrigation strategies, calculating the irrigation dose to be applied based on short-term weather forecasts coupled to algorithms for calculating soil evaporation and crop transpiration. The initial programming based on models will be adjusted according to plot determinations of the water status of the plants that will allow both refining the irrigation dose and, at a more technological level, establishing the intra-plot variability in order to better adjust the agronomic design of the irrigation.

As a result of the experiments carried out in the project, the following articles have been published in journals:

• Raij-Hoffman et al. (2024). Detecting soil water redistribution in subsurface drip irrigated processing tomatoes using electrical resistivity tomography, proximal sensing and hydrological modelling. Science of The Total Environment, 912, 169620.
• Pappalardo et al. (2023). Performance evaluation of a low-cost thermal camera for citrus water status estimation. Agricultural Water Management, 288, 108489.
• Ramírez-Cuesta et al. (2023). Determining grapevine water use under different sustainable agronomic practices using METRIC-UAV surface energy balance model. Agricultural Water Management, 281, 108247.
• Juste et al. N. (2023). Una nueva modernización del regadío valenciano basada en la digitalización y las nuevas tecnologías (DigitalRiego). Phytoma España, 353, 173.
• Ramírez-Cuesta et al. (2023). Modelización de las necesidades hídricas en el cultivo de brócoli. Evaluación fisiológica y agronómica. En XXXIX Congreso Nacional de Riegos (pp. 1-10).
• Ramírez-Cuesta et al. (2023). Capability of hyperspectral and thermal data to predict gas exchange and chlorophyll fluorescence parameters in broccoli. En 2023 IEEE MetroAgriFor, 126-130.

This project has been funded by the Valencian Innovation Agency (GVA-AVI) and the European Union through the ERDF. This action may be co-financed by the European Union. Valencian Community ERDF Programme 2021-2027.

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