ISADORA+: A decision-support tool for irrigation scheduling in fruit tree orchards

Resúmen de la comunicación oral preentada en el XVIII Congreso Nacional de Ciencias Hortícolas SECH 2025 Valencia 9-12 junio 2025

This study presents ISADORA+, a novel software tool developed to optimize irrigation scheduling in super-high-density (SHD) fruit tree orchards. Recent climate projections indicate significant changes in atmospheric conditions in the main olive-growing regions, including increased atmospheric demand and decreased rainfall. These changes are affecting olives’ water requirements. Traditional rainfed orchards with widely spaced trees are increasingly being replaced by irrigated orchards with higher planting densities, such as the super-highdensity (SHD) hedgerow system. This is one of the most profitable cropping systems for olive, although the irrigation management is particularly challenging. Developed in 2024, ISADORA+ will be tested along the 2025 irrigation season in a 1667 ‘Arbequina’ trees ha−1 orchard at La Hampa, the experimental farm of the Instituto de Recursos Naturales y Agrobiología, near Seville, southwest Spain. The tool can operate using one or a combination of the following approaches: (1) The Allen and Pereira (A&P) method (Allen and Pereira, 2009), the most advanced version of the crop coefficient method, which incorporates factors such as leaf area dynamics, ground cover, tree height, and stomatal conductance (gs), among others; (2) A mechanistic model of gs for olive, which determines irrigation amounts for each event based on simulated gs and tree leaf area; and (3) A machine-learning algorithm designed to automatically derive a water stress index from trunk diameter variations records. ISADORA+ features three-day weather forecast integration for proactive irrigation adjustments, and it can deliver recommendations through a mobile application to farmers. This work shows preliminary results of the ISADORA+ testing.

Acknowledge the ECOVER group for their support, and the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (currently the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades), the Agencia Estatal de Investigación and the FEDER program “A way to make Europe” for funding both the ISADORA research project ref. PID2021-124651OB-I00 and my predoctoral contract PRE2022-104644

Peer reviewed