Online administered course n. 3 – Water Use Efficiency and Performance Assessment

In the framework of the FAO Building Forward Better Initiative, the  Land and Water Division is organizing an online administered course on Water Use Efficiency and Performance Assessment.

The training – the third of the series – will focus on the main elements of water use efficiency and related strategies to increase water performance for the improvement of water and food security, while moving towards the achievement of SDG6.

The module  will introduce FAO MApping System and Services for PRESssurized irrigation (MASSPRES) as a step-wise approach for the mapping of the behaviour of pressurized irrigation systems and the assessment of their hydraulic performance. A specific session will focuse on the re-vamped Rapid Appraisal Procedure (RAP) to define its main indicators for the appraisal of irrigation systems at any scale, as well as presenting the computer-based version, under development, to be used for pressurized irrigation system.

Training sessions will cover the following topics:

• Irrigation management at different scale;
• Real-time spatiotemporal data acquisition systems – agroclimatic stations as mainstream technologies to estimate crop water requirements;
• Irrigation scheduling;
• Data acquisition through remote sensing: from plot to basin scale to improve water use efficiency;
• Performance assessment methodologies for system-level appraisals & the RAP;
• Management appraisal;
  
• System level efficiency of pressurized irrigation systems;
• Farm-level efficiency of irrigation system;
• The use of drones as an emerging technology in in-plot data acquisition.

The training, organized in collaboration with the University of Castilla-La Mancha, will be delivered in English with live interpreting in French.