Projects

OPTAIN: Optimal strategies to retain and re-use water and nutrients in small agricultural catchments

IRIDA: Innovative remote and ground sensors, data and tools into a decision support system for agriculture water management

Efficient agriculture water use is of crucial importance for water resources management. Evapotranspiration is an important part of the water cycle, as it is the sum of evaporation and plant transpiration from the Earth's land and ocean surface to the atmosphere. Consequently, accurately determining evapotranspiration (ET) is the first step for improving irrigation efficiency and productivity and for quantifying the ecosystem water balance. The IRIDA´s approach is to combine on the ground ET and soil moisture measurements, with remote sensing ET determinations obtained with unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV/RPAS/UAS) (at plot scale) and manned vehicles and satellites (at catchment scale). IRIDA will integrate the methodologies and routines into a decision support system that will serve to manage the large amount of inputs by means of big data analysis tools. The IRIDA platform to be created will provide simple irrigation recommendation supporting end-users and irrigators when deciding the exact location for installing on-ground soil and plant water status sensors. On the other hand, at the water basin level, under conditions of varying land use as in northern Northern Europe, the evaluation of satellite remote sensing will allow increasing the accuracy of the ecosystem water balance determination, improving flood predictions and the water footprint assessment. At the end of the project execution, End Users’ interfaces and applications such as cloud web server and smartphone applications to exploit solution intelligence will be designed. By using the IRIDA protocols, the water savings to be achieved are expected to be around 7 to 15% and the estimated direct farm savings costs could be up to 420 €/ha. These first estimations based on theoretical assumptions, will be validated in several field demo-areas in Spain, Italy, Romania and Norway across different environmental and cropping conditions.

PacKnoPlast - Sustainable decision-making for food packaging given consumer rejection of plastic

The project aims to develop environmentally friendly food packaging solutions where the use of plastic packaging is limited to where plastics is environmentally preferable to other materials and needed to preserve food quality through distribution, storage and use.

Riverine Inputs and Direct Discharges - RID

The Comprehensive Riverine Inputs and Direct Discharges (RID) programme aims to monitor and assess all inputs and discharges of selected contaminants to the OSPAR maritime area and its regions that are carried via rivers into tidal waters, or are discharged directly into the sea, for example through sewage pipelines or activities like aquaculture inputting substances directly.