EARTH OBSERVATION‐BASED SERVICES FOR IRRIGATION WATER MANAGEMENT IN AUSTRALIA: THE COALA PROJECT

Ensuring the sustainable use of water resources is one of the most crucial aims of optimizing agricultural systems. The integration of advanced Earth Observation (EO) technologies provides useful and innovative solutions in revolutionizing agriculture. The COALA (COpernicus Applications and services for Low impact agriculture in Australia) project developed a Copernicus‐based information system to assist in optimal irrigation water management in Australia. The COALA project demonstrated how the DIAS (Data and Information Access Services) cloud platforms through front‐end Application Programming Interface (API) can facilitate the delivery of key information for sustainable crop management using innovative algorithms based on Sentinel‐2 (S2) data, targeting the needs of various stakeholders that include farmers, water managers, and basin authorities. In this short communication, we present the results of the COALA validation campaigns, where crop Evapotranspiration (ETc) modeled with Penman‐Monteith (PM) and Shuttleworth (SW) models were cross‐validated by using Eddy Covariance (EC) data collected over irrigated crops in the Goulburn Valley (Victoria). Additionally, the spatially distributed Crop Water Requirements maps were compared with irrigation water volumes measured at farm and district scales in the Murrumbidgee Valley (New South Wales), where the actual irrigated areas were detected by using classification algorithms applied to vegetation index time series derived from S2 data.