Service 1:

Context of implementation

North African region is facing water scarcity issues. Over-abstraction and illegal drilling of water for agricultural purposes cause irreversible damage to soil and groundwater resources. In a context of strong dependence of agriculture on irrigation and high rainfall variability, urgent and mandatory actions are needed to ensure sustainable water resources management is a North Africa. This service can serve as a proxy to get useful information and data, which can support manage water resources in the region.

Objective

The objective of this service is to provide timely and relevant information on the locations where irrigation activities are performed, including amount water withdrawn from groundwater resources. The service consists mainly in:

• Mapping irrigated areas and providing long-term spatiotemporal trends for better analysis.
• Generating multi-scale EO-based methodologies for estimating and monitoring volumes of water withdrawn for irrigation purpose.
• Providing spatial indicators on resources state, anthropic pressures and natural factors, crop water productivity.
• Monitoring system for uncontrolled and unauthorised irrigation extensions and overexploitation of aquifers.
• Producing decision making scenarios based on simulations and projections on water resources state, uses and evolution.

Results and outputs

This service will provide timely information on irrigated areas and water abstraction, specially:

• Geospatial information on groundwater availability and use.
• Maps of Irrigated agricultural areas.
• Analysis tools (chart, graphics & statistics) and time series biophysical variables on Irrigated areas and related water abstraction.
• Information on amount of water withdrawn for irrigation purposes.
• Information on the population vulnerability and water stress.