looking backto go forward: reassessing crop water requirements in the face of global warming

In Mediterranean regions agricultural irrigation is the main pressure on renewable water resources. In the common practices, farmers irrigate without an explicit assessment of the actual net irrigation requirements, and generally tend to over-irrigate with consequent loss of water. A major effort in the past years has been devoted to developing reliable tools for estimating crop water requirements (CWR) and net irrigation water requirements (NIWR). Within this frame, the primary objectives of REWATERING are: 1) to reassess CWR for tomato and soybean; 2) to create a reference databank of remote imagery and field data, for the two crops cultivated in a set of representative pedoclimatic locations in Italy; 3) to develop new tools to assimilate remotely derived crop data into operational forecasting systems for determining CWR, NIWR, and crop yield under different environmental conditions.