WaterWise Planner – smart irrigation for waterwise crops

CSIRO’s WaterWise initiative focuses on providing Australian irrigators with digital solutions for determining when to apply irrigation water that optimises the water use, yield, and quality of the target crop.

Water savings through improving water use efficiency will benefit industries as it could be applied to increase the area of crop and/or to increase yield in existing areas.

The WaterWise initiative uses Senaps to deliver irrigation analytics to growers by combining real-time sensor data, BoM forecasts and analytics.

Researchers from the WaterWise team embedded their existing analytics code (written in R programming language) into Senaps workflows. In addition, real-time data from canopy temperature sensors and weather forecasts from BoM are integrated into Senaps and the analytics workflow.

The benefit of such systems is the ability for users to see the cumulative heat stress of plants in between rain or irrigation events, and to get a recommendation of when to irrigate based on the predicted future time when the heat stress might rise above a recommended threshold.