Crop water requirement prediction and observation of potential productivity on the scope of a Mediterranean agricultural plot

Over the past century there has been a dramatic increase in water scarcity and drought in arid and semiarid territories even in the Northern Hemisphere, that nowadays have become a topic of increasing research attention also in European Union. Despite Europe's being considered as having adequate water resources, water scarcities and droughts become an increasingly frequent and widespread phenomenon in the scale of the European Union. The imbalance caused by water demand much over the available water resources is a major drawback. In addition, consequences of climate change are expected to produce more negative impacts on water availability, adding pressures to the most stressed EU regions including the Mediterranean. During recent years, Earth Observation (E.O.) from space has become the most important source of data for monitoring much of the land surface-atmosphere processes and in particular the hydrology of agricultural and forestry areas. Nowadays, E.O. data are implemented in operative applications for the management of land and water resources (D'Urso et al. 2015). Implementations such as land and water resources monitoring (Behera et al. 2018; Jódar et al. 2017), water quality monitoring (Imen et al. 2018) have been possible in a more efficient manner with thanks to remote sensing. Individually, FATIMA (FArming Tools for external nutrient Inputs and water MAnagement) is one of the joint research efforts which used the E.O. data in order to monitor and manage the agricultural resources in a more effective and efficient way. The project was funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 programme of research and innovation. It is a multi-national project with 9 active participating countries. In the project, satellite data from Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 sources were used to monitor pilot plots where various crops have been traditionally cultivated. In the process of 3 years in the project, each harvest provided new outputs about forecasting crop water requirements (CWR) and each plot's yielded variability. Crop monitoring and CWR services have been available since 2015 on the internet platform socalled spiderWEBgis which has been developed by Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM) and data sourced by each pilot area. This paper presents the methodological framework of potential productivity map and accuracy of the CWR prediction throughout the irrigation season of the Turkish pilot area considered in the FATIMA project.