Walsh Fellowship Number – 2014017 Duration – 4 year PhD Title: Precision agriculture tools and their application land drainage issues in Ireland Abstract The construction and maintenance of artificial drainage systems in Irish Farms is a fundamental aspect of agricultural production. There is increasing concern that drainage has been recently overlooked and acts as a serious constraint on future growth scenarios (beyond H2020). Teagasc has begun the heavy soils programme (HSP) to help design farm level systems for farming on heavy soils, but a national overview is missing. This project has two parallel research goal: producing geographic data on the extent of heavy soils in the Border, Midland and Western (BMW) region that have likely been drained and develop new tools using unmanned aerial vehicles as survey platforms to map intra-field drainage – both underground and over ground flow. The landscape assessment works with new agro-pedo-climatic models on production developed in Teagasc Spatial Analysis in conjunction with satellite derived estimates of grass growth to identify localities in heavy soil areas that appear to be successfully drained. A map such as this will improve both agronomic expansion targeting at a national level and catchment scale nutrient modelling. The field scale assessment of drainage will conduct two small campaigns to examine the use of thermal imaging to locate underground drains and high resolution aerial imaging to create 3D topography maps to create overland flow models of high utility. Tools such as these will be an order of magnitude cheaper to use than existing techniques. Cheap effective means to monitor underground drainage (and, in the future, irrigation systems) to ensure maintenance of the drains are very important. Understanding the nature of the drainage systems installed is also an important pieve of information for costing farm expansion. Contact: Dr Tim McCarthy 01 7086180 [email protected] NCG, Iontas Bldg, NUI, Maynooth, Co Kildare OR Mr Stuart Green 01 8459955 [email protected] Spatial Analysis Centre, Teagasc, Ashtown
Posted on: Sat, 25 Oct 2014 13:45:31 +0000
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