WATERTRUF.

New technologies for smart water management in truffle growing

Implementation period

March 2022 – December 2022

Field of work

Digital technology

Adaptive management and governance

Grant

This project has received aid in the form of a grant under the Agrupaciones Empresariales Innovadoras (AEI) support programme.

File number: AEI-010500-2022-104

Description

The cultivation of the black truffle is of growing economic and social importance in depopulated Spain. Savins are mostly located in areas with low rainfall and degraded soils, making irrigation an essential task, given the current context of low rainfall. Knowledge of the physiological state of the savin in response to water stress is perceived as a value proposition to establish the need for irrigation in truffle plantations, optimising truffle production in terms of quantity and quality parameters. To this end, IoT digital technologies, sensors, Cloud and Machine Learning (all of them applied in WATERTRUF) play a fundamental role, as they allow the end user to monitor and know in real time the water status of the plantation.

Objectives

WATERTRUF aims to optimise irrigation management in savin truffle plantations through the combined use of new non-destructive digital technologies that allow continuous monitoring and real-time tracking of the physiological state of the tree to have sufficient information for the development of intelligent algorithms that generate irrigation recommendations.

Results

The project is in the installation and validation phase of the monitoring system developed within the framework of the project based on the use of advanced PRI sensors and data loggers. Three sectors have been selected within the Truffle Farm of the company Mytruff in Cella (Teruel) with homogeneous soil conditions but with different irrigation schedules: high (sector 3, irrigation every 7 days), medium (sector 5, irrigation every 14 days) and low (sector 4, irrigation every 21 days). Within each of these sectors, a savin tree has been selected for the placement of the various sensors contemplated in the project.