EU Water Framework Directive 2000/60/EC and the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in Europe together with the present national policies of the Northern Africa countries, and UN SDGs goals, highlights the need of improving water irrigation management towards its sustainable use and economic saving. In this framework, the project, responds to the call objectives proposing a real-time operative water and economic management web-gis tool for parsimonious and precise irrigation optimizing crop yield and economic income, integrating farm analysis into water district one. The tool will allow to monitor and forecast the soil moisture behaviour at farm and district levels to define the right irrigation discharge, optimizing water and economic indicators. The tool supports different levels of stakeholder: i) farmers who control soil moisture avoiding plant water and saline stress, ii) irrigation consortia which allocates water among users; iii) water authorities which manage water withdraw from reservoirs. In addition, the tools present also the possibility to be used as simulator of water allocation supporting decision strategy at irrigation district scale in real time and for seasonal forecast scenarios. Multi satellite data, ground measurements, daily and seasonal meteorological forecast, soil water budget numerical modelling, crop growth model, and economic analysis will support the tool. The proposed tool and embedded methodology will be applied in different case studies of the Mediterranean area: Italy, Spain, Egypt Tunisia and Morocco and also in China characterized by different climatic conditions, fresh and saline water availability, crop types, irrigation practices, polices and water pricing. These case studies will be also used for diffusion of parsimonious irrigation practice through technology transfer and dedicated courses for farm and irrigation district people.

Soils, as reservoirs for the green water, are essential in agricultural ecosystem services. Their hydric functioning in water balance model is described by their Available Water Content AWC, i.e. the maximum quantity of water available for plant growth. No consensus exists about neither its definition nor its real value, whereas it is a widely used concept, known by farmers and scientists as well. AWC is estimated on soil by soil scientists, using laboratory measurements, field monitoring, or calculation by pedotransfer functions using soil databases. Ecophysiologists and agronomists estimate AWC from in-situ monitoring of plant development, or inverse modelling of crop models. The RUEdesSOLS project then aims at developing, evaluating, benchmarking and coupling references methods in a synergistic and interdisciplinary scheme, to propose a methodology for the AWC estimation that could be used in a large range of pedoclimatic conditions at plot and territory scales. It also consists in analysing the impact of uncertainty associated to these AWC estimates. To reach these objectives, the RUEdesSOLS consortium gathers scientists from the field of soil science, ecophysiology, agronomy, remote sensing and modelling. It is a mixed consortium with partners involved in basic research (INRA, CNRS, CNES, University of Toulouse) and other involved in applied research (ARVALIS, CETIOM). It is organized in 6 workpackages dedicated to i) the management of the project, the sharing of data and the dissemination [WP1], ii) the comparison and fusion of soil-based and plant-based approaches [WP2], iii) the measurement of soil/plant parameters and the collection of legacy data [WP3], iv) the soil-based estimation of AWC [WP4], v) the plant-based estimation of AWC [WP5], and iv) the impact analysis of the AWC estimations on two applied study-cases in relation with the estimation of ecosystem services, say the sunflower yield and the maize irrigation. The transfer of the RUEdesSOLS project toward end-users is assured by the three UMTs (Unité Mixte Technologique) CAPTE, EAU and TOURNESOL, whose assignment is to transfer scientific results from basic research into applied contexts, and by the RMT (Réseau Mixte Technologique) Sols & Territoires, that intends to increase and enhance soil knowledge, from the farm scale to rural territories.