SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, May 2. (EUROPE PRESS) –
The Cabildo de Tenerife is developing a project to study the most important regions in which banana and avocado cultivation is carried out with the aim of making decisions about the irrigation of the farms under study and anticipating the needs for water supply of these crops in a seven day horizon.
This project, called Regadia, is carried out through the Institute of Technology and Renewable Energies (ITER) and in a consortium with the Canarian Institute of Agricultural Research (ICIA) and the University of La Laguna (ULL).
Once a sufficiently representative data set is available, work will begin on predictive irrigation models using artificial intelligence (AI) techniques.
Bananas are the crop with the highest water demand in Tenerife and represent 60% of the island’s agricultural water consumption. On the other hand, avocado cultivation, which requires a high water supply, has been growing exponentially in recent years.
ITER technicians, thanks to the support of the Irrigation Office of the Cabildo de Tenerife, have made visits to several of the banana and avocado farms on the island to evaluate the characteristics of the plots where water meters and sensors will be installed. moisture.
ITER is also working on the development of electronic devices that will be installed in the field to, on the one hand, collect the data from the sensors and, on the other, send this data to a cloud storage service that will be installed and available in the ITER supercomputer (HPC) for subsequent exploitation within the framework of the project.
In parallel, ICIA has begun to analyze soil samples from representative farms, with the aim of characterizing the water retention capacity and thus providing valuable information to the predictive models.
The Regadia project (PLEC2022-009444), coordinated by the ITER Robotics Unit, will last 36 months and is financed by the Ministry of Science and Innovation and the State Research Agency (10.13039/501100011033) and by the European Union within the framework of the EU Next Generation EU Recovery Plan and the Spanish Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan (PRTR).
