WADIT
Water Digital Twin

The main objective of the project is the creation of the digital twin of the physical asset (land use, moisture content of soils, frequency and date of irrigation of crops and irrigation techniques, etc.) for water management at basin level, aimed at supporting the water balance.

The focus is mainly on the analysis of water requirements related to water use in agriculture in order to arrive at a reliable estimate of actual water consumption in the field.

The models to be studied, designed and implemented experimentally will allow Big Data (multi-platform remotely sensed data, data from agro-meteorological stations, core data from Copernicus services, commercial data, census data) to be processed using artificial intelligence techniques.

The system resulting from the engineering of the studied models, fine-tuned and integrated, will be able to provide, at district/basin level, the estimate of irrigation needs/consumption, periodically updated on the basis of the data acquired and processed in near real time on the area of interest.

WADIT provides:

– The production of dynamic land use maps;

– The identification of the location and extension of irrigated areas;

– The identification, through the use of artificial intelligence algorithms, of irrigated areas with a high probability of unauthorised water use;

– The production of KC crop coefficient libraries for different types of crops in different agro-ecological contexts;

– The use of weather and climate data, provided by the European Copernicus programme, to feed the models for calculating irrigation requirements;

– The creation of a digital infrastructure, the digital twin, to automate the process of processing, analysing and returning summary reports and analytical indicators.

Three study areas are planned, one in Salento, one in northern Barese and the other in Capitanata, in order to represent the different characteristics of the Apulian territory (crops, farm structure, availability of irrigation sources, services and quality of irrigation water). After setting up the models for the three test areas, the system will be applied to the entire regional territory. The digital twin will be able to create scenarios for short term estimation (12 months to take into account the variability of the herbaceous species) or for the simulation of land transformations that lead to radical changes in requirements in the long term (10/20 years as in the case of planting)

The achievement of the goals will allow the subjects in charge of water resource management to

– have updated and homogeneous data on the entire territory of interest for a dynamic management of the water resource;

– reduce the time needed to produce the reports required by water resource management regulations

– carry out estimates and simulations by preparing different scenarios of water resource use and availability;

– assess the aptitude of the territory to support cultivation transformations on the basis of the availability of irrigation resources in order to direct investments by private operators;

– identify sites with a high probability of unauthorised water resource use in order to implement water protection policies.

The system developed by the WADIT project will support the decisions of:

– bodies (public and private) in charge of water management that must estimate and assess seasonal irrigation needs and consumption at basin/district/region level and, based on availability, plan use;

– bodies (public and private) in charge of managing the irrigation water service as a tool for monitoring and controlling irrigation withdrawals at farm level;

– operators in the agricultural sector for investment planning in the planting of agricultural areas, both in the short term for annual crops and in the medium term for tree crops (20/50 year time frame).

Project manager: Manuela Matarrese; manuela.matarrese@dtascarl.it

Budget: 5 M EUR

Scientific manager: Vincenzo Barbieri, barbieri@planetek.it

Partner: DTA scarl, leadpartner, con: Planetek Italia, Sitael SPA, CNR (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche) con gli Istituti IRSA (Istituto per la Ricerca sulle Acque), IREA (Istituto per il Rilevamento Elettromagnetico dell’Ambiente) e ISTP (Istituto per la Scienza e Tecnologia del Plasma), Università degli Studi di Bari “Aldo Moro” con i Dipartimenti di Scienze Agro-Ambientali e Territoriali e il Dipartimento di Fisica.