Research report regarding the use of sensors for irrigation management. WP6, Action 6.4. Deliverable 6.4.3 - 6.4.5

This report contains a description of the activities carried out by CNR-ISPA (P4) in the framework of WP6 - Specialized research actions, Deliverable 6.4.3 and 6.4.5 - Experiments regarding sensors evaluation for greenhouses - Research report regarding the use of sensors for irrigation management. The activities focused on testing sensors for growing substrate parameters measurement (moisture and electrical conductivity), and sensor-based irrigation management strategies in greenhouse, with the aim to provide tools for irrigation decision and plant water requirements study. We implemented both laboratory and on-field activities, focusing on important greenhouse vegetable crops (namely tomato and lettuce) in Mediterranean environment. We also developed a pre-commercial prototype for the automatic sensor-based irrigation in greenhouse. Beside an introductive examination of the state of the art and of the concepts at the base of the carried out activities, a description of the experiments and of the results is included in this report. We outline that the full dataset from the experiments is at the moment under use or consideration for publication in scientific international journals, with the aim to present the outcomes of the IRMA project to the wide scientific community. Therefore, in order to be compliant with the universal requirement for scientific publication (the material should not have been previously published elsewhere, except in a preliminary form) we will not include in this report the full set of data; however, we will give anyway an exhaustive overview of the findings of the project activities.