Enhancing Mediterranean agriculture: Towards a sensor based decision support tool for efficient irrigation management in smallholder orchards

The Mediterranean agriculture is currently facing various challenges resulting from population growth, need for nature conservation, efficient usage of resource and necessary resilience regarding climate change. The fact that smallholders play an important role in the agricultural community raises the question how they could adopt new efficient irrigations strategies and technologies. We present the concept of a decision support tool for irrigation management that aims to overcome obstacles in adapting new technologies for smallholders and provides irrigation recommendations for orange and olive orchards. The derived irrigation recommendations are either based on the FAO-56 approach, or on a soil water balance model relying on soil moisture data. The second is based on soil moisture sensors and here, we are addressing two crucial factors: (i) the assurance of good data quality, and (ii) the site-specific threshold identification for soil moisture measurements, showing possible methods and occurring challenges.