Towards water sustainability in agriculture through closed-loop irrigation

水对我们的日常生活是必不可少的。在过去十年中，世界经济论坛一直将确保水和粮食安全的挑战视为最重大的全球风险之一。人口增长是造成全球供水危机的主要因素。淡水最大的用途是农业，约占淡水总消耗量的70%。在加拿大，艾伯塔省、不列颠哥伦比亚省和萨斯喀彻温省是灌溉用水的三大消费国。根据艾伯塔省政府的一份报告，艾伯塔省分配给灌溉的水已经达到上限。任何进一步增加的灌溉面积都需要主要通过提高用水效率来实现。在萨斯喀彻温省25年水安全计划中，有效利用水被确定为缓解供水压力的首要行动领域。虽然农业消耗的淡水量最大，但由于当前灌溉战略的开环性质，农业灌溉用水的平均效率很低（估计约为50%至60%）。在目前的农业灌溉实践中，需要灌溉的水量和灌溉的时间基本上是由灌溉者（农民）基于灌溉者的知识和收集到的各种辅助现场数据（例如，天气信息，蒸散发（ET）率，随机采样的土壤湿度）以开环方式提前确定的。然而，在过程控制中，开环控制是不精确的。也就是说，开环灌溉通常会导致过度灌溉或灌溉不足，这意味着水的利用效率很低。该项目的目标是关闭灌溉决策过程，开发闭环精确灌溉解决方案，以显着提高农业用水效率。该项目具有巨大的社会影响，将为水资源可持续性、国家和全球粮食安全以及温室气体减排做出贡献。

Water is essential for our daily life. The challenge of ensuring water and food security has been consistentlyrecognized as one of the most significant global risks by the World Economic Forum over the past decade.Population growth is the primary factor causing the global water supply crisis. The most substantial use offreshwater is in agriculture, which accounts for about 70% of the total freshwater consumption. In Canada,Alberta, BC and Saskatchewan are the top three irrigation water consumers. According to a report of theGovernment of Alberta, the water allocated to irrigation in Alberta is already capped. Any further increase inirrigated acres needs to come primarily from improvements in water efficiency. In the 25 Year SaskatchewanWater Security Plan, efficient use of water is identified as the No. 1 action area to relieve the increasedpressures on water supplies. While agriculture consumes the largest amount of freshwater, the averageagriculture irrigation water efficiency is low (estimated to be around 50% to 60%) due to the open-loop natureof the current irrigation strategy.In the current agricultural irrigation practice, the amount of water to be irrigated and the time to apply theirrigation are essentially determined in advance by the irrigator (the farmer) based on the irrigator's knowledgeand various collected auxiliary field data (e.g., weather information, evapotranspiration (ET) rate, randomlysampled soil moisture) in an open-loop fashion. However, it is well recognized in process control thatopen-loop control is quite imprecise. Namely, open-loop irrigation generally leads to either over-irrigation orunder-irrigation, which implies low water-use efficiency. The goal of this project is to close the irrigationdecision-making process to develop a closed-loop precision irrigation solution to significantly improve thewater-use efficiency in agriculture. This project has a great societal impact and will contribute to watersustainability, national and global food security, and greenhouse gases emission reduction.