SPONSOR:
Natural Resources Conservation Service, United States Department of Agriculture
PROJECT PERIOD:
02/15/2016 – 09/01/2021
PROJECT PIs:
Sayed Bateni, Jonathan Deenik, Mohammad Golabi, Aly El-Kadi, and Ian Gurr
ABSTRACT:
Recently, the University of California Cooperative Extension developed CropManage (https://ucanr.org/cropmanage) for the temperate and semi-arid climate of California. CropManage is an online database-driven tool that assists growers and farm managers to determine water applications on a field-by-field basis. Unfortunately, this tool cannot be directly transferred to tropical islands as the soils and climate of California are very different from tropical Pacific Islands like Hawai‘i, Guam, and American Samoa. A multidisciplinary team from the University of Hawai‘i, University of Guam, and American Samoa Community College collaborating with Dr. Michael Cahn, the developer of CropManage, to build an online smart irrigation scheduling tool for the vegetable crops in Hawai‘i. We are collaborating with professors, extension agents, and farmers from Guam and American Samoa to extend this tool to a wider geographic region. These regions are geographically isolated and under increasing threat of water scarcity due to climate change, and have limited tools and resources to manage their water. In addition, they are economically challenged by the high cost of water and energy due to their isolation.
PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATORS
