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Although there are, as of yet, no specific GIS applications for irrigation management, there are several products related to precision agriculture which offer tools to monitor the water use in order to improve land/crop performance and offers several GIS functionalities. These precision agriculture software packages can be used to identify strategies for improved land/crop management. Precision agriculture software provides a link between crop production records and spatial (map) data, including site-specific or land management units. Precision agriculture software is required for field data collection (spatial and non-spatial), data management and data analysis.

Satellite observation provides information of a large area with spatial resolution from under a meter up to 50 km and temporal resolution from 5 min up to a few days. Satellites measure radiances over various parts of the spectra of electromagnetic radiation. The data is subsequently processed to derive geophysical parameters for the observed area and delivered in this more informative form as satellite observation products. High resolution products are more suitable for irrigation [1], especially in cases where the land parcels are small. The satellite data of interest for the precision irrigation is mostly data relevant to the water cycle, hydrology and meteorology and provided by missions aimed at gathering such data.

Precision agriculture demands intensive field data acquisition. One of the keys to understanding productivity variability lays in frequent data acquisition and interpretation. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are a relatively new and rapidly developing class of wireless communication networks which can provide processed real time field data from sensors distributed in the field. The sensor nodes deployed on the field measure various atmospheric and soil parameters. These measurements can help in making decision on irrigation (automating, semi automating), fertilizer and pesticide applications, intruder detection, pest detection, yield prediction, plant disease prediction, fire detection, etc. The first part of this brief is devoted to Wireless Sensor Network technology with particular focus on its application in precision agriculture.