21 Oct The MoniCa project will bear the FIWOO seal of approval

The MoniCa project is an agro-monitoring system for extensive herbaceous crops in Cadiz. This system is based on remote sensing, IoT and Artificial Intelligence. Hence, its name: MONI for “monitoring” and CA for “Cádiz”.

FIWOO is working in the MoniCa project on the monitoring of agricultural sensors and the construction of a special GIS for visualization of layered information from AI algorithms in which we are working together with the University of Seville, more specifically with the Department of Geography, with the team led by Victor Rodriguez and Manuel Lobeto.

What does MoniCa really consist of?

This project is funded by the European Innovation Partnership through the Ministry of Agriculture. As we have already mentioned, the University of Seville, Emergya Grupo, ASAJA Cadiz and CTA are the project partners.

It has received € 255,000 in funding from the funds for the creation and operation of Operational Groups of the European Innovation Partnership (EIP) under the Rural Development Program of Andalusia 2014-2020.

This system will make use of Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and Geospatial Analysis technologies.

Role of FIWOO in the project.

FIWOO, based on FIWARE, will be the platform used to build all the components and modules to be developed in the project. It will integrate satellite time series processing, in situ data assimilation from IoT sensors, integration with Open Data, holistic analysis using Artificial Intelligence and information dissemination.

Real-time monitoring service.

This system will integrate Earth Observation program data (Sentinel-2 and MODIS satellite images) of different resolutions (10, 20 and 250m) every 5 days and daily data.

These data are intended to provide two services to the Agricultural Association of Young Farmers of Cadiz and to the individual farmer as end users:

• Cadiz Regional Crop Development Service (SRD). Its objective is to provide information on the performance of the current campaign at provincial and SIGPAC precinct level.
• Local Service for Crop Management at SIGPAC plot level (SLM). In this way, it will be possible to better adjust the supply of these inputs to achieve yield optimization. On the other hand, an improvement in the sustainability of agricultural ecosystems at the plot scale will be obtained.

MoniCa takes advantage of the European Space Agency (ESA) service “Copernicus Land”. It proposes an innovative approach for the integration of optical data from Sentinel and MODIS missions. Data captured from satellites and in situ sensors are transformed by Artificial Intelligence into real-time information for crop management: vigor, leaf area index, nitrification needs or water stress.

A more sustainable and efficient agriculture.

The current challenges pose a digital transformation of the agri-food sector. The MoniCa project will contribute to meet these new challenges by developing operational services capable of monitoring the status of all arable crops in the province of Cadiz.

This will improve competitiveness by reducing production costs. It will also minimize the environmental impact of agricultural practices.