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Irrig‐OH: An Open‐Hardware Device for Soil Water Potential Monitoring and Irrigation Management
Author(s) -
Masseroni Daniele,
Facchi Arianna,
Depoli Edoardo Vannutelli,
Renga Filippo Maria,
Gandolfi Claudio
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
irrigation and drainage
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.421
H-Index - 38
eISSN - 1531-0361
pISSN - 1531-0353
DOI - 10.1002/ird.1989
Subject(s) - irrigation , agricultural engineering , irrigation management , water resource management , environmental science , business , engineering , agronomy , biology
Sustainability of irrigation practices is an important objective to be pursued in many countries, especially in regions where water scarcity causes strong conflicts among different water uses. The efficient use of irrigation water is a key factor in coping with the food demands of an increasing world population and with the negative effects of climate change on water resource availability in many areas. In this complex context, it is important that farmers can rely on instruments and practices that enable a better management of water at the field scale, whatever the irrigation method they adopt. In this paper, we present an open‐hardware device based on the Arduino technology that was developed to allow the continuous monitoring of soil water potential in the root zone for supporting irrigation scheduling at the field scale. The structure of the device is flexible and can be adapted to host different types of sensors. The results, obtained managing irrigation in a peach orchard, show that adoption of the device, together with a simple irrigation scheduling criterion, allowed a significant increase of water use efficiency without causing a reduction of the quantity and quality of crop production. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.