The study will be carried out at El Salheya El Gedida – Sharqia governorate (northeast of Egypt), in an agricultural exploitation of about 13.800 hectares, managed by the “Sixth of October Agricultural Projects Company”. The irrigation infrastructure includes 120 irrigation pivots supplied with water through an on-demand steel pipeline system coming from the Nile River through the Ismailia canal with an average annual water consumption of about 140 million m3. The main cultivated crops are wheat, maize, and peanuts, representing 40% of the total cultivated area.
The selected area is retained suitable for mainly three reasons: (i) the availability of necessary resources for the model’s validation, (ii) the large extension covered by each pivot that allows overpassing the limitation in spatial resolution of the satellite data, and (iii) the cultivated crops are largely spread and cultivated in Egypt, thus, allowing for the implementation of the model at national scale.
