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Project Topic
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The main objective of PRECIMED will be to build a data driven irrigation management system in order to improve Water an Nutrient Use Efficiency (WUE and NUE, respectively) in the Mediterranean Region, by integrating the knowledge about fertilizers and irrigation water management with Information Communication Technologies (ICTs), which will be respectful with the environment and socioeconomically profitable. The solution provided by PRECIMED is a system that can be easily accessed and handled by the end-user through customer-friendly interfaces like mobile phones, tablets or PC. Its system will be comprised of several subsystems; Data Acquisition subsystem, DSS subsystem (Decision Support System), and User Interaction subsystem, each of them composed of different sources of information and component like state-of-the-art agronomical sensor, soil and crop databases, automatic meteorological databases, etc. PRECIMED will be able to collect large amount of crop data, which will be processed and analyzed by the system, after which it will provide feedback about crop needs and real time recommendations to the farmers with respect to irrigation and fertilization best practices. The application of this irrigation technology will improve the life of Mediterranean farmers and also will permit to save water and fertilizers in one Region with important problems of water stress and soil contamination. The challenge is to create stronger bridges between the two shores of the Mediterranean basin, which is composed of EU and non-EU countries. In this sense, the consortium is made up of SMEs, Research centers, and end users that will collaborate to validate the system, from both sides of the Mediterranean: Tunisia, Algeria, Spain, and Greece. PRECIMED will also explore profitable business models to make the system marketable and will involve the end-user, from the beginning of the develoSMEnt phase, by means of SCRUM methodology. It will allow the consortium to reach a useful system, tested and validated by supporting farmers in the different participating countries, and therefore to reduce the gap between application developers and agricultural players.
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