The Murcian Institute for Agricultural and Food Research and Development (Imida) has developed, in collaboration with the Integra Foundation, a free and easy-to-use mobile application that allows the design of personalized irrigation programs, depending on the type of crop and the location of the plots registered by users in the Murcia Agricultural Information System (SIAM).

This new tool, called 'Agroclima. Comprehensive management of open access meteorological variables for agrarian planning ', is mainly based on the agrometeorological data sets registered by the 52 SIAM stations, managed by Imida and posted daily in the Regional Open Data Portal of the Autonomous Community.

Once registered, the user can consult these variables in real time whenever they want and customize them according to the type of crop they have in each of the plots that they register in the application.

In this way, Agroclima makes it possible to find the closest station to each plot and, based on the data from the Open Data Portal and other specific REST services, to calculate the water needs of the registered plots, providing the data to users.

This application, which will be available for Android and iOS, has recently been awarded the third prize for Open Government, framed in the First Edition of the Open Government, Good Government and Administrative Modernization Awards of the Region of Murcia.

In this regard, the director of Imida, Víctor Serrano, stated that this project implies “a notable improvement in the quality of public services aimed at the agri-food sector. Agroclima is a clear example of the benefits of bringing research closer to society and, in this specific case, of how the reuse of open data can improve the efficiency of different economic sectors ”.

This new application, also a finalist in Aporta Challenge 2019 (an initiative promoted by the State Secretariats for Digital Advancement and Public Function), will expand its functionality in 2021 with geolocated services on climate risks developed within the EU ClimAlert project.

SECOND VERSION

The Agroclima 'app', promoted by the Imida Geographical Information Systems and Remote Sensing Team, within the Feder 1420-25 project, will also allow, in a second version, to generate alerts on weather incidents such as frost, heat waves, strong winds , high rainfall intensities, etc.

The functionality of the system is complemented by the rest of the Imida web applications, where meteorological information and orientation programs for irrigation and fertilization of most regional crops can be consulted in more detail.