Objectives and goals

The cost and difficulty of finding water combined with other, increasingly costly, inputs have led in recent years to the abandonment of a significant number of arable lands. Especially for cotton, with particular needs for irrigation, fertilization and plant protection, in areas with high irrigation costs and limited availability, the reduction of arable land is rapid (over 100,000 hectares of cotton reduction in Larissa in the last five years).

At the same time, climate change and especially extreme events (droughts, heat waves) significantly pressure production (Lesk, et al., 2016), potential agricultural income. They contribute significantly to the over-extraction of underground water reserves since the more than 2 million hectares of cotton in Greece require more than one billion cubic meters of water. Modern precision agriculture technologies (Feng, et al., 2017) contribute significantly to both the assurance of cotton production and optimal, environmentally management practices. In this direction, the project will implement and disseminate innovative methodologies for valid and timely monitoring, making optimal and environmentally friendly decisions in cotton crops.