Anticipating crop rotation to better manage water resources: how can land use data be used?

Abstract

Knowing the land use of a region is an important issue for water managers since it is a key factor for estimating irrigation withdrawals. This paper presents an exploratory work, which involves sampled land use data from the Ter-Uti survey, exhaustive land use date from land survey and stochastic modelling of crop rotation rules. The limits of the present study, due to few case studies, are discussed, as well as the potentialities of the approach for managers and the opportunity offered by remote sensing for improving the proposed methodology.