Water logging detection and mitigation over flat agricultural terrain with remote sensing
Picture from Getty Images/iStockphoto, author: ghornephoto
Aside from flooding, agricultural areas in flat terrain suffer from seasonal water logging after excessive precipitation. Contrarily to flooding, water logging is a concept that only involves the contiguity of water bodies. Water bodies are close but remain disconnected. In a flood, there is also a continuity or linkage among water bodies that is a requirement for water to flow. Floods have longer return periods (once in several years) compared to precipitation events producing water logging several times per year. At the same time, the accumulated volume of water in depressions, ponds and lakes is larger during floods, consequently, it takes longer to evaporate and infiltrate when compared to waterlogging. From the crop point of view, standing water creates hypoxic conditions and reduces crop yields. Farmers are very interested in controlling water logging as they are more frequent, they also affect crop productivity and the water management effort may be local (farmer scale) in comparison with flooding that they cannot manage.
Accurate quantification of water balance components and calibration of hydrological models can help in designing mitigation strategies in these frequent water excess cases. This topic intends to work at the local (farmer) level.
Objectives:
- To evaluate remote sensing techniques: Analyze the effectiveness of satellite imagery, aerial drones, and ground-based sensors and preexistent information in detecting and monitoring flood and/or water logging events.
- To develop predictive models: calibrate hydrological models that integrate remote sensing data with meteorological forecasts to predict flooding events and assess their potential impact on agricultural areas.
- To evaluate using crop models scenarios of water logging severity in relation to crop production for some parcels having water-affected and non-affected areas with the same crop.
- To propose mitigation strategies: Identify and recommend engineering and ecological solutions based on remote sensing insights to reduce the impact of floods.
There are literally thousands of documents explaining and exemplifying aspects of water control in flat agricultural areas. Particularly Gabriel Parodi did his research in Argentina on this topic having several introductory articles. The pages are in Spanish but they can be automatically converted into English.
An interesting review is on this page (in Spanish)
TE: Modern farming techniques like Precision Agriculture (PA) or Smart Farming, are essential to improve efficiency in farmlands. For instance, the addition of a GPS harvest monitor connected to the harvesting machine offers an absolute value of grain amount in some accountable unit every 10 m (or similar) of field. This information should expose the vulnerabilities of the different water logging sectors in the farm. How to manipulate the pre-existent information, Earth Observations and PA measurements to detect farm sectors having different productivity anomalies or low productivity?
SPG: Farmers are grouped in organizations sharing knowledge and training. Those groups have high influence at the regional level as they are sourcing or reference for members with less experience in resources. In these agricultural flatlands, they share the water logging problem. In many cases, water logging is a cascade where producers (higher position) and recipients (lower positions) farmers are to work together. What would be an adequate setting where farmers share their experience in showing their particular problem, the procedures they use for the collection of information related to the problem and the discussion of possible common solutions and collaborations?