WaterSense is a project for the design and construction of decision support tools for water management.
Water boards are responsible for managing quality and quantity of water in a region. This is a complex activity, because of the many different interests that need to be taken into account. In rural areas for instance, the requirements of agriculture, nature preservation, drinking-water authorities, and villages (keeping dry feet) all need to be taken into account. Often, these interests may appear to be conflicting, but in any case they are very dynamic.
Furthermore, the system is subject to many influences that cannot be directly controlled, such as fluctuation in the water level in main waterways, and weather circumstances (rainfall, drought)
SmartCycle
The SmartCycle approach is very well suited to this kind of complex situation. WaterSense is a collaborative project that aims to apply this approach in order to provide the users and managers of the water system with the tools required for intelligent management of the system. This is especially important because of the increasing scarcity of clean water world-wide.
The decision support modules that WaterSense aims to develop are meant to advise on the following actions: water-level management, long-term area planning, crop irrigation, crop fertilization, crop protection, surface-water quality, ground-water quality.
In order to achieve this, WaterSense will actively monitor a large area in the Hunze-valley in the province of Drenthe in the Netherlands (WaterSense plaatje!). This includes: soil-moisture and soil-salinity sensors in 100 farmfields in the area, water-level sensors in surface streams at various locations, water-quality measurements at selected sites, measurements of ground-water levels, soil-profile measurements, measurements of crop development, detailed weather monitoring, etc. These different streams of data will be calibrated, validated and analyzed, turning them into information flows to be used as input for computer models. This includes hydrodynamic models of the surface water system, ground-water models, crop-growth models, and soil-chemistry models.
The combination of the information-flows with the models results in knowledge components regarding the system as a whole. These are then combined into the different advisory units that form the decision-support system.
The WaterSense collaboration
WaterSense is a collaboration of the following partners: Water supply company Drenthe , Province of Drenthe , Water board Hunze en Aa’s, Dacom Plant Services, DySI, Hydrologic, and Applied Plant Research (PPO), with the support of the Water laboratory North and the Top-technological Institute Wetsus .
WaterSense is a project under the umbrella of “Sensor Universe” and has received funding through the Northern-Netherlands program “Koers Noord”, and as such is made possible in part by generous grants from the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs program “Pieken in de Delta”, and the European Fund for Regional Development (EFRO).
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