Summary

MARSWM-Asia addresses the challenges in managing water resources in Asian floodplains by jointly developing an Integrated Water Management Platform comprising of state-of-the-art technologies for monitoring and forecasting the state of water, land and crop production. This platform will assist timely and better operation of water management facilities to achieve better and sustainable agricultural production．

Goals

The goal of this collaborative research project is to develop and share a GIS-based “Integrated Water Management Platform” to assist operators of water management facilities for adaptive management of agricultural water in Asian deltas. This platform visualizes real-time observations and short-term forecasts of hydrological states on PCs and hand-held devices that are crucial to decision making.

Approach

For the development of the platform, the following five elemental technologies will be developed and integrated by the collaboration of partner countries; (1) remote sensing techniques that prioritize risk mitigation zones and evaluate crop growth and damages; (2) sensor networks based on ICT to monitor real-time hydrological state; (3) physical models to generate a number of input data fed to machine learning model as training data; (4) machine learning (ANN) model to quickly produce quasi-real-time forecasting of water levels and saltwater states; (5) GIS-based visualizing application to display current states and forecasting results on PCs and hand-held devices.

The Scheme of MARSWM-Asia

Expected Outcome

The platform will reduce inundation and saltwater damages on crops. The degree of damage mitigation can be quantitatively presented through high-speed computation by the combination of the physical model and ANN model. As water disasters are projected to increase in the future, the introduction of this platform will accelerate the change in water management in Asian deltas from experience-based to objective information-based which will secure sustainable agricultural production for farmers. This project also will nurture young researchers in the fields related to water resource management through technological exchange and networking among partner countries.