Irrigating from space

FAO; World Bank

Irrigating from space

Using remote sensing for agricultural water management

Year of publication 2022

Place of publication Rome, Italy ;

Pages 12p.

Author FAO; World Bank

Publisher FAO ;

Product type Policy brief

ISBN 978-92-5-137452-8

Full item page

Synopsis (short abstract) With water becoming increasingly scarce and irrigated agriculture already accounting for 70 percent of global water withdrawals, governments around the world are supporting efforts to improve the performance of water use in agriculture. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and its partners have invested in developing databases and tools that apply remote sensing in agricultural water management, with a focus on low-income and data-scarce contexts. This brief was produced under the FAO-World Bank Cooperative Progamme and proposes concrete applications of the FAO-developed tool: WaPOR – Water Productivity through Open access of Remotely sensed derived data portal.

Cite this content as:

FAO and World Bank. 2022. Irrigating from space – Using remote sensing for agricultural water management. Investment brief. Rome, FAO.

https://doi.org/10.4060/cc3745en

Language English

Related items

Showing items related by metadata.

Booklet

From Space to Farm: Characterization of Small Farms Using Remote Sensing Data 2021

Also available in:

No results found.

This publication describes the analytical process carried out under the European Union-funded SALSA project which enabled the development of a European map of the distribution of small farms at the NUTS-3 level and assessed the capabilities and usefulness of Copernicus Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 satellites for small farms monitoring, specifically in providing information about crop types, crop area extent and crop production.
Book (stand-alone)

WaPOR database methodology
Version 2 release, April 2020
2020

Also available in:

No results found.

The FAO portal to monitor Water Productivity through Open Access of Remotely sensed derived data (WaPOR) provides, as of today, access to 11 years of continued observations over Africa and the Near East. The portal provides open access to various spatial data layers related to land and water use for agricultural production and allows for direct data queries, time series analyses, area statistics and data download of key variables to estimate water and land productivity gaps in irrigated and rain fed agriculture. WaPOR Version 2 was launched in June 2019 based on extensive internal and external validation and quality assessment. This document describes the methodology used to produce Version 2 of the data at the 250m (Level 1), 100m (Level 2) and 30m (Level 3) resolution distributed through the WaPOR portal.
Book (stand-alone)

Water Accounting in the Litani River Basin
WaPOR Water Accounting reports
2019

Also available in:

No results found.

This report provides the water accounting study for Litani River basin in Lebanon carried out by IHE Delft using the Water Productivity open data portal (WaPOR) of the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). The Litani River basin is one of the key river basins in Lebanon and it is experiencing water scarcity with annual renewable water resources being 606.9 mm3/yr. With an estimated population of 375 000 in 2010 and doubled by 2016 due to the Syrian refugee crisis, the total per capita water availability is around 800 m3/cap/yr indicating water shortage. Increasing challenges such as growing population, climate change, groundwater over-exploitation and inter-basin transfers have put the available water resources in the basin under stress. The completeness and quality of the hydro-meteorological records are insufficient to draw an appropriate picture of the water resources conditions. However, the Water Accounting Plus (WA+) system designed by IHE Delft with its partners FAO and IWMI has been applied to gain full insights into the state of the water resources in the basin for the period 2010 to 2016. The WA+ framework is a reporting mechanism for water flows, fluxes and stocks that are summarized by means of WA+ sheets.