Mapeo de áreas regadas usando datos geoespaciales y teledetección en el municipio de Caudete de las Fuentes (Valencia)

Las políticas de control del uso agrícola de aguas subterráneas mediante la inspección de contadores se han demostrado caras y poco eficientes, mientras que en algunos estudios se ha obtenido resultados prometedores mediante la teledetección. El rápido progreso de las tecnologías de teledetección ha hecho posible su aplicación para la identificación de áreas regadas, y los nuevos sensores y técnicas de inteligencia artificial abren nuevas oportunidades a mejorar su eficacia y precisión. Nuestro trabajo propone una metodología de bajo coste y eficiente para detectar viña en riego a escala de parcela con el fin de mejorar la gestión colectiva de aguas subterráneas. A partir de información oficial se ha distinguido la superficie regada con técnicas de análisis de aprendizaje automático, empleando variables que condicionan el estado hídrico de la planta para la temporada de riego 2019. La metodología calcula la humedad del suelo con el método OPTRAM (OPtical TRApezoid Model) de análisis multitemporal de imágenes procedentes de plataformas satelitales. Estos datos son integrados en un SIG junto a información climática, topográfica e información propia del cultivo. Finalmente, en base a inventarios de verdad-terreno se aplica un clasificador de aprendizaje automático para estimar la superficie regada con agua procedente del acuífero. Los resultados obtenidos presentan una precisión general del 94.7%. Su evaluación aporta un error medio cuadrático de 0.163 y R-cuadrado de 0.874. La alta precisión y los bajos niveles de error obtenidos permiten validar la metodología empleada, que presenta potencial de mejora mediante una mayor alimentación del proceso de aprendizaje automático, que se aplicará en breve a otros cultivos leñosos

Riverhood: political ecologies of socionature commoning and translocal struggles for water justice

Mega-damming, pollution and depletion endanger rivers worldwide. Meanwhile, modernist imaginaries of ordering ‘unruly waters and humans’ have become cornerstones of hydraulic-bureaucratic and capitalist development. They separate hydro/social worlds, sideline river-commons cultures, and deepen socio-environmental injustices. But myriad new water justice movements (NWJMs) proliferate: rooted, disruptive, transdisciplinary, multi-scalar coalitions that deploy alternative river–society ontologies, bridge South–North divides, and translate river-enlivening practices from local to global and vice-versa. This paper's framework conceptualizes ‘riverhood’ to engage with NWJMs and river commoning initiatives. We suggest four interrelated ontologies, situating river socionatures as arenas of material, social and symbolic co-production: ‘river-as-ecosociety’, ‘river-as-territory’, ‘river-as-subject’, and ‘river-as-movement’

Hybridizing the commons. Privatizing and outsourcing collective irrigation management after technological change in Spain

During the last decades, several regions of the world have experienced an increasingly forceful penetration by commercial service companies into irrigation water management, altering the institutional structures and procedures of common-pool resources management. In many cases, private-sector penetration takes place when water user organizations require a company to implement high-tech water control such as pressurized irrigation systems, as part of ‘modernization policies’. This study focuses on four representative cases of these processes with differing degrees of private-enterprise penetration in the Valencia Region (Spain). The research analyzes the strategies of collective-private confrontation and collaboration that are emerging in irrigator communities, and characterize how they affect the management of these irrigation systems. Results show how private enterprise intrusion has unequally affected the interactions between the different components of these irrigation systems. This has created different hybrids between private and common pool-resources management institutions, as well as different autonomies, dependencies and socio-political subjects. Users’ capacity to guide this coproduction process and maintain local control over their irrigation systems is essential to ensure the stability and preserve the robustness of each irrigation system. The quality of human capital and the recognition of collective water management values makes irrigation entities more robust vis-à-vis external pressures and disturbances, which in some of the cases analyzed have generated major social conflicts

Communality in farmer managed irrigation systems: Insights from Spain, Ecuador, Cambodia and Mozambique

CONTEXT: Worldwide farmer managed irrigation systems have provided crops for food, feed and the market for centuries. From high mountain environments to river valleys and deltas, in all continents people have organized to construct, use, maintain, transform and sustain irrigated agro-ecosystems. In this context it is important to better understand how these systems are sustained.  OBJECTIVE: The objective of this contribution is to explore and theorize through which strategies and mechanisms irrigators are able to sustain these systems in a constantly changing socio-environmental context.  METHODS: The study is based on ethnographic qualitative research in four areas where farmer managed irrigation systems are sustained by irrigators (Valencia region, Spain; Ecuadorian highlands; Cambodian Mekong delta; and Tsangano district, Mozambique). Research consisted of interviews and observations in these areas and was supported by a literature review of what has been published about these systems.  RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: Results show that farmer managed irrigation systems are dynamic systems that constantly transform but that are sustained in these changes through what we term ‘communality’. We introduce this term to point out three interrelated elements that stand at the basis of farmer managed irrigation systems sustenance, namely: commons, community and polity. Analysis of the four case studies points out that these three elements are mobilized differently by farmers depending on their socio-environmental context. We show that the mobilization of these different elements amidst internal and external challenges and conflicts, forms the basis for the longevity and sustainability of collectively managed irrigation systems.  SIGNIFICANCE: In the literature on farmer managed irrigation systems collective action has been portrayed as the main pillar that sustains these systems. This contribution challenges this notion by showing that irrigation systems are sustained by a combination of individual actions, collective practices, normative frameworks and organizational forms; a sense of community; and the development of political agency (polity). Recognizing that these elements come together as site specific hybrids opens new avenues of inquiry to better understand the sustainability of farmer managed irrigation systems

Communality in farmer managed irrigation systems: Insights from Spain, Ecuador, Cambodia and Mozambique

CONTEXT: Worldwide farmer managed irrigation systems have provided crops for food, feed and the market for centuries. From high mountain environments to river valleys and deltas, in all continents people have organized to construct, use, maintain, transform and sustain irrigated agro-ecosystems. In this context it is important to better understand how these systems are sustained.  OBJECTIVE: The objective of this contribution is to explore and theorize through which strategies and mechanisms irrigators are able to sustain these systems in a constantly changing socio-environmental context.  METHODS: The study is based on ethnographic qualitative research in four areas where farmer managed irrigation systems are sustained by irrigators (Valencia region, Spain; Ecuadorian highlands; Cambodian Mekong delta; and Tsangano district, Mozambique). Research consisted of interviews and observations in these areas and was supported by a literature review of what has been published about these systems.  RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: Results show that farmer managed irrigation systems are dynamic systems that constantly transform but that are sustained in these changes through what we term ‘communality’. We introduce this term to point out three interrelated elements that stand at the basis of farmer managed irrigation systems sustenance, namely: commons, community and polity. Analysis of the four case studies points out that these three elements are mobilized differently by farmers depending on their socio-environmental context. We show that the mobilization of these different elements amidst internal and external challenges and conflicts, forms the basis for the longevity and sustainability of collectively managed irrigation systems.  SIGNIFICANCE: In the literature on farmer managed irrigation systems collective action has been portrayed as the main pillar that sustains these systems. This contribution challenges this notion by showing that irrigation systems are sustained by a combination of individual actions, collective practices, normative frameworks and organizational forms; a sense of community; and the development of political agency (polity). Recognizing that these elements come together as site specific hybrids opens new avenues of inquiry to better understand the sustainability of farmer managed irrigation systems