A group of researchers have launched a new water measurement tool to help producers and irrigators in southern Alberta. Irrimap is an easy-to-use, web-based program to measure evaporation and transpiration in agricultural settings, primarily crop and hay fields. “You can remotely locate information that’s relevant to your question immediately and don’t have to go out into the field to measure it yourself,” said Michael Kehoe, a research assistant with Mueller Irrigation Research Group at Lethbridge Polytechnic. The program uses publicly available data to show evapotranspiration amounts for selected areas, from small hectare fields to whole sections. The project was funded by Agriculture and Agri-food Canada to help give users valuable insights into crop water usage from a phone or laptop. “The Mueller Irrigation Research Group is developing forecasting models that forecast soil moisture and this information is crucial to correcting those models,” said Kehoe. “The models give us an idea of what is going to happen, but they aren’t perfectly accurate and the data helps us correct it. Similar to how a GPS system works on your phone.” As conditions continue to change for farmers in the region, researchers say having up-to-date data for producers is vital for the entire agricultural industry. “The importance and value of precision agriculture is growing as input costs increase, driving down margins for producers,” said Willemijn Appels, a senior research chair with Mueller Irrigation Research Group. “Irrimap is an important tool that can be used to optimize growth and crop potential through variable rate irrigation and other precision, data-based technologies.” The program was coded and programmed by research assistant Derian Setoguchi. “We’re taking a picture of a field and we’re figuring out how much of that field is plant matter and how much the plant is losing in water,” said Setoguchi. “So, we use open-source weather data to figure out how much the plant should theoretically be putting out and then we multiply that by NDVI value—the biomass—and that gives us how much it should actually be putting out.”
