Overview
The Virtual Irrigation Academy (VIA) designed, developed and scaled tools for monitoring water, nitrate and salt, focusing on smallholder irrigators. The VIA is primarily about how a new way of collecting, displaying and sharing information stimulates social learning and leads to a cascade of benefits.
Colour is a universal language that connects the knowledge domains of scientists and farmers into a unified learning system. The tools give output as colours, representing thresholds for action. Data is presented as colour patterns highlighting water and solute dynamics, such as under and over-irrigation, nitrate leaching and salt accumulation.
Scientific impacts from the project include:
- A novel sensor that can be mass-produced at low cost and retain excellent accuracy
- A suite of monitoring tools that provide complementary and mutually reinforcing data (water/salt/nitrate)
- Detecting salinity through chameleon sensors
- Colour and pattern visualisations that act as boundary objects between different stakeholder knowledge domains
- The ability to relate yield to patterns
- The ability to average data across schemes and/or years for M,E&L and
benchmarking - The ability to show inequality in water distribution across schemes
View the project page
