Water requirements and footprint of a super intensive olive grove under Mediterranean climate

Abstract The water footprint of a product can be described as the volume of freshwater used to produce it, associated to a geographic and temporal resolution. For crops, the water footprint relates crop water requirements and yield. The components of water footprint, blue, green and grey water footprints, refer to the volumes of respectively, surface and groundwater, rainfall, and water required to assimilate pollution, used to produce the crop yield. The global standard for crop water footprint assessment relies on evapotranspiration models to estimate green and blue water evapotranspiration. This approach has been used in the present study to estimate the water footprint of a very high density drip irrigated olive grove and further compared with data obtained from evapotranspiration measurements or from its components: the eddy covariance method to quantify latent heat flux, a heat dissipation sap flow technique to determine transpiration and microlysimeters to evaluate soil evaporation. The eddy covariance technique was used for short periods in 2011 and 2012, while sap flow measurements were performed continuously, hence allowing the extension of the data series. Measurements of evapotranspiration with the eddy covariance method provided an average close to 3.4 mm d-1 (2011) and 2.5 mm d-1 (2012). The ratio of evapotranspiration to reference evapotranspiration approached 0.6 and 0.4 for the respective periods. The water footprint of the olive crop under study, calculated with field data, was higher than the water footprint simulated using the global standard assessment and was lower than that reported in literature for olives. Lower values are probably related to differences in cultural practices, e.g., the density of plantation, harvesting techniques and irrigation management. The irrigated high-density olive grove under study had a high yield, which compensates for high water consumption, thus leading to a water footprint lower than the ones of rainfed or less dense groves. Other differences may relate to the procedures used to determine evapotranspiration