Project description
Smarter, more efficient water management in agriculture
Rising pressures on water quality and quantity due to agricultural activities pose critical challenges, exacerbated by climate change impacts. Nutrient and pesticide runoffs, alongside overexploitation of natural water sources, threaten ecosystems and human health. The EU-funded UNIVERSWATER project brings together a consortium of 15 partners across six European countries. By integrating innovative portable sensors, earth observation imaging, and advanced AI, the project will improve water resource use and enhance on-farm treatment of dairy soiled water, mitigate soil salinisation, and optimise fertiliser/pesticide application. This initiative aims to revolutionise agri-water management, paving the way for smarter, more efficient water resource use and environmental stewardship.
Objective
Water quality and quantity are under arising pressure from agricultural activities that may cause overexploitation of natural waters and pollutants runoffs (e.g. nutrients, pesticides). These stresses are also compounded by climate change effects. To address the complex challenges of agri-water management, the UNIVERSWATER consortium will adopt a system of systems approach by developing and improving technologies designed to optimise water resources uses in a fully integrated way. A dedicated interdisciplinary and intersectoral consortium of 15 partners from six European countries will: a) develop innovative portable and in-situ sensors for a number of parameters and pollutants (salinity, nutrients, CEC, microbiological indicators) and b) couple them with earth observation imaging and advanced explainable and robust artificial intelligence techniques, as well as c) develop cost-effective, sustainable methods based on nature-based and technology-based solutions for water remediation at the point of need and d) promote the adoption of the developed methods through pricing incentive provision. These technologies will be integrated into decision support systems (DSSs) that will be tested at three case studies tackling on-farm treatment of dairy soiled water, mitigation of soil salination through water reuse, and optimisation of fertiliser/pesticide application for freshwater preservation. Going beyond, UNIVERSWATER will upscale these local DSSs into a common platform where a suite of DSS tools can be adapted to different situations after being tailored to the local factors, thereby developing a modular, extensible and holistic universal DSS.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- agricultural sciencesanimal and dairy sciencedairy
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectronic engineeringsensors
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Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-RIA - HORIZON Research and Innovation ActionsCoordinator
T12 YN60 Cork
Ireland