Understanding the Role of Remote Sensing (RS) in Supporting Agricultural Water Management in SE Asia
In many low- and middle-income countries, there’s limited on-the-ground monitoring of water resources like river flows, groundwater levels, and agricultural water use. Building and maintaining this kind of infrastructure, especially for groundwater, can be costly and complex, leading to gaps in vital data.
This International WaterCentre led project aims to explore the potential for remote sensing (RS) technologies and associated data products to fill hydrological data gaps and support sub-basin agricultural water management.
Research Objectives
- Understand what RS data can tell us about water availability and use at the sub-basin level, and assess how accessible these tools are in terms of cost to produce/access, technical capacity, and computer resourcing.
- Map out how water decisions are made in small-scale farming at the sub-basin level, using Vietnam as a case study for SE Asia. This includes identifying who makes decisions, how, and when, and placing this within a broader regional context.
- Pilot the application of a water accounting tool and RS products for use in rural Vietnam. The focus is on how usable and relevant these tools are water managers and decision-makers.
- Identify the feasibility and strategies for scaling-up these tools for the potential use in other sub-basins within Vietnam and in similar contexts across the region.
