Droughts are worsening due to changing climate, affecting all reliant on water resources. Since agriculture is by far the largest consumer of freshwater, sustainable production practices are the only way forward to mitigate the most severe impacts on the local environment, which is also acknowledged by the Australian agricultural sector. Scalable and transparent methods to report on the water productivity and sustainability are needed to allow agriculture industries to continuously improve their productive and sustainable water use. However, local reporting initiatives using in-situ data are labour-intensive, costly, and not scalable. Therefore, we aim to inform the Australian agricultural sector on the advances in EO-based water productivity and sustainability reporting. We will accomplish this by integrating state-of-the-art EO-based estimates on irrigation and precipitation and alternatives to locally sourced inputs with advanced hydrological models. Contrasting to most existing EO-based water productivity and sustainability indicators, we aim to include most of the intricacies of irrigation systems and the consequent losses that occur during the application of irrigation, enhancing the reliability of the indicators. The proposed system will not only deliver these indicators for the entire Australian continent but also provide transparency on each of the components used to calculate the indicators. Although we will focus on the entire Australian irrigated agricultural sector, we have a particular interest in the Namoi and Murrumbidgee River valleys where we have already established lasting relationships with local stakeholders. The REINFORM consortium is well experienced in leading and implementing EU funded projects. With 4 research focussed SMEs, a private sector company and a university, we have the scientific depth needed for research and development, as well as the commercial insight and flexibility needed to meet market demand beyond REINFORM.

The Sentinel missions and Copernicus Services provide a global view of environmental parameters of prime importance for climate and environmental research. The accuracy and high spatial resolution of the data play a crucial role in representing physical, chemical and biological processes. Models can develop precise parametrisations of these processes and of their complex interactions. HiSea, combing measurements and models, has an enormous potential to improve the understanding of the coastal environment. HiSea services will deliver information, readily available and with high resolution to fit seamlessly user‘s operation and management requirements. HiSea will provide a co-designed service that offers high resolution water quality data at sea answering to specific questions from the targeted port and the aquaculture sectors. HiSea will develop, in operational mode, novel Copernicus-based downstream services that will incorporate Copernicus Marine, Land and Climate Services Products, local monitoring data, and advanced modelling in the service integrated representing an added value for the potential Copernicus data users. The downstream service includes among others early warning alerts, alarms to potential risks for the daily activities; real time crisis management to simulate mitigation actions to adverse effects; automatic reporting on the key performance indicators; standard datasets; and building knowledge data base of cause-effect relations (business intelligence). From the data storage to the processing using Docker containers, the HiSea platform will be fully compliant to cloud deployment, prepared to DIAS infrastructure. The immediate market uptake of the HiSea services by the targeted ports and aquaculture users is guaranteed. Linking to the market and experience of the partners to deliver similar services, HiSea has the capability to demonstrate the proposed services at regional or even global scale.

Shortages of freshwater will be one of the most pressing problems in feeding the world this century. To optimize use of available water it is important to distribute it wisely over the various competing interests, in particular agriculture, which is responsible for 70% of all freshwater use. Irrigation is currently often unsustainable, while groundwater reserves are becoming depleted and many places in the world are suffering water shortages. Action is therefore required now to use space and in-situ monitoring systems, to create a better sense of water availability and optimise use across the planet. WaterSENSE will provide water-availability and mapping services for any place in the world at different time and space resolutions, based on integrated Copernicus data, hydrological models and local data. The results of these services will be open access so as to further develop value-adding services. WaterSENSE itself will deliver the essential value-added service of monitoring compliance of local water use against water rights and regulations (‘water auditing’). The first application will be in the multi-climate Murray-Darling Basin in Australia, followed by validation in South Africa and the Netherlands. Consortium partners already provide water-availability and water-auditing services in the latter two countries. Novel research in the project will develop scalable information services, based on advanced big-data processing algorithms, to determine variables such as evapotranspiration, irrigation water use, rainfall and soil moisture, as well as machine learning to allow automatic data processing and reduce uncertainty in the hydrological variables determined. DIAS services for data provision, as well as cloud hosting and processing of computational services, will be developed and implemented. Existing successful partnership models will be refined to ensure service providers in the water value chain achieve healthy business development.