MONITORING AND REPORTING HORTICULTURAL WATER USE EFFICIENCY FROM VALVE UNIT TO CATCHMENT BOUNDARY

Increasing competition between irrigation and the environment, over allocation of water resources and global warming effects will lead to more stringent monitoring and reporting of Water Use Efficiency (WUE) performance. A syndicate of the Murray-Darling Basin Commission (MDBC), South Australian Government departments and rural water management agencies initiated a three year project for the development of methodologies and associated tools to standardise WUE reporting from irrigation valve units on individual properties to the catchment boundary. The integrated toolkit employs highly accurate mapping techniques and a rigorous scientific approach to produce high quality WUE indicators at various scales. The three prototype tools developed are the Irrigation Inventory Tool (IIT), a Water Use Efficiency Module (WUEM) and a Farm Level Water Management Module (FLWMM). The IIT, a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) based tool utilising the functionality of ESRI ArcGIS Software, is designed to provide systematic and consistent capture and storage of crop and irrigation information using digital orthophotographs as a basis for mapping and survey. It collates several key datasets required for calculation of both Crop Water Use (CWU) and production/yield based WUE indicators into a District Irrigation Database (DIDb)