Mapping of Sustainable Agriculture Indicators in Africa using remote sensing (WA+) and hydrological models (SWAT+) (OZR3150)

The project aims at integrating management of agricultural, land and water resources by developing and evaluating a framework for integrated management of evapotranspiration (ET). ET is the key link between agricultural water productivity (more crop per drop) and catchment hydrology. Water productivity and ET efficiencies will be estimated for interventions proposed by farmers and policy makers using field observations, remote sensing data and models. The main goal of the project is to provide suitable indicators for Sustainable Agriculture (SAI) in Africa that enable evaluation of the health of water resources within a basin. SAIs have been developed by many organisations. The innovation in the project lies in developing SAIs using T and ET estimations derived from remote sensing techniques and agro-hydrological models. Since a time-integration is needed to calculate total water consumption, it is also important to account for the sub-daily and seasonal variability as well as cycles of (evapo)transpiration processes and irrigation patterns. Agro-hydrological models are able to provide simulations for present and future scenarios, though a new calibration and evaluation strategy is needed to provide reliable estimations. In this project, we propose a new methodology that uses remote sensing data for the calibration and evaluation of the crop and plant processes of agro-hydrological model SWAT+.

Keywords:Sustainable Agriculture Indicators, remote sensing, hydrological models

Disciplines:Agricultural and natural resource economics, environmental and ecological economics