A team at the University of 麻豆传媒 at 惭ā苍辞补 has been awarded a $900,000 grant by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)’s Natural Resources Conservation Service through a program that supports the conservation of private lands through funding projects centered on technology and innovation.
UH’s project, Forecasting daily reference evapotranspiration and rainfall for water resources conservation and sustainable agriculture, is led by principal investigators Sayed Bateni of the and the (WRRC), Jonathan Deenik and Jensen Uyeda of the and Aly El-Kadi of the and WRRC.
The team aims to demonstrate how farmers can conserve water and be more effective in utilizing water resources by implementing an innovative new method to model and forecast daily rainfall and evaporation in irrigation areas. The approach centers on use of an artificial neural network that breaks down complex long-term time-series into simpler units, providing more accurate forecasting.
The USDA’s Conservation Innovation Grants program awarded a total of $12.5 million in 2019 to 19 different projects addressing areas including water quantity, urban agriculture, pollinator habitat and accelerating the pace and scale of conservation adoption. The goal of the program is to foster innovation to provide solutions to the most pressing issues facing farmers today, using science to support agricultural conservation and sustainability.