| abstract: |
The WaterBee Smart Irrigation Demonstration Action is the follow-on phase from the very successful FP7-SME-007-1 WaterBee “Research for SMEs” project (222440) that ended in September 2010, & very convincingly researched, developed & proved the concept of the WaterBee Prototype to provide an unique scientific soil-moisture model that automatically adapts to each installation & crop with a distributed Web-based Wireless Sensor Networked (WSN) Smart Irrigation system to optimise Water Use Efficiency (WUE) in irrigation. There is a pressing need & excellent commercial opportunity for such a system in Agriculture, which is the largest industry in the world & (according to the WWF), wastes 60% of the 2,500 trillion litres of water it uses each year - which is 70% of the world's accessible water – a huge threat to the environment. A major culprit is inefficient water irrigation systems. In Europe irrigated agriculture is the biggest water consumer (over 60%) in the Mediterranean, where drought is an increasing problem. To bridge the gap from the very successful Research project, & enable its SMEs to be able to address this significant market opportunity, WaterBee will be scaled up to a full reliable operational field prototype service, that will be demonstrated & validated over a 15 month period with complete growing cycles of various crops in 6 contrasting sites across Europe, in Estonia, Italy, Malta, Sweden, Spain & UK, to quantify profitable operation of the WaterBee service for Growers, with water savings of 40% while enhancing crop quality in each site. The project will quantify the market & identify potential users of a commercial WaterBee Service. Based on these & ongoing feedback from the demonstration sites the project will disseminate the WaterBee service to potential customers & business partners through various media & 2 specific events, & develop/validate a Business Plan for the SMEs to commercially develop & exploit the service after this Demo Action ends. |
