Last season, 704 hectares of illegal greenhouses were detected in Doñana, basically in its Northern Crown. Although it represents a considerable reduction compared to the 1,023 in 2018, the figure is still very high, which is why a tool that is destined to be decisive now joins this battle: artificial intelligence associated with satellite remote sensing. If before months passed between one image and another in these growing areas, which gave less room for reaction to irregularities, now they will be updated every five days and the application will also automatically alert if the plastics are lifted in soils that do not have permission to irrigation.
“This allows us an almost immediate capacity for action, it is wonderful,” admits Alejandro Rodríguez, Water Commissioner of the Guadalquivir Hydrographic Confederation (CHG), the state body in charge of managing water resources in the national park. . “If you catch an irregularity on the fly, there are more options to act,” since the speed with which new images will be obtained will allow detecting an illegal greenhouse while it is being set up, not when it is finished, it has crops in full development and it is already more complicated. the intervention.
Designed in collaboration with the University of Seville, what the tool does is process satellite images with artificial intelligence algorithms to detect crops under plastic. The analysis crosses the geolocation of the greenhouse with cadastral information and with databases that include irrigable agricultural land and irrigation concessions, both those granted, those denied and those in process. “It is a very powerful tool that allows us to know in days what previously took us months.”
With all this data, it detects irregular patterns, which is nothing other than the presence of plastic in a plot that does not have authorization to collect water. Although the application allows you to check the “cartography of rights” of the land, it is not sufficient on its own to initiate a sanctioning procedure by the Water Commissioner, although it does “ring the alarm” and will lead to an inspection visit. “There may be some false positives, but the reliability is 99%,” highlights Rodríguez.
A public website to point out the offender
The Confederation had already been using remote sensing and telemetry systems to date, but the new tool represents a qualitative leap. “This is already like in Minority Report“, equates the Water Commissioner, taking as an example the popular 2002 Steven Spielberg film. The next step is for all this data to be public through a website, which is considered a “deterrent measure for possible offenders”, since “he is going to point them out” publicly.
The system is being applied right now to supervise the greenhouses in the Northern Forest Crown of Doñana, but the objective little by little is to use it in the entire Guadalquivir basin, in which almost 900,000 hectares of irrigated land are distributed, representing 25% of all those authorized in Spain. And if the first use is with plastics, the next step will be to use it in rice fields and to detect irrigation ponds.
The Northern Crown has been precisely at the center of the political and social debate for the last two years, since it was the area in which the Andalusian PP planned to regularize (via law in Parliament and with the blessings of the Junta of Andalusia) a significant amount of crops that illegally extract water from the Doñana aquifer. That gave rise to an agreement between the central and Andalusian governments, so Rodríguez considers that farmers “right now are clear that there is no possibility of regularization” of these crops and this, together with measures that include this new tool , will reduce the greenhouses without permission.
Of course, and despite the fact that the Environmental Prosecutor’s Office is already asking for jail time in cases of illegal water extraction, the path is still slow in the fight against illegal wells. “From the moment it is reported until there is a final ruling to close it, at least seven years pass,” says the Water Commissioner.
A digital twin
And what is the next step? Well, in addition to applying artificial intelligence to satellite images, what is coming now is the creation of a digital twin of the water system thanks to the existing network of piezometers – half of them in Doñana. On the one hand, the water meters required by the regulations will send the data directly to the Hydrographic Confederation “with the guarantee that it has not been manipulated”, a transfer that will now be possible even in areas without telephone network coverage. mobile.
On the other hand, the piezometric network measures the water levels in the system, so the digital twin (“a mechanism that high-end cars already have, for example, to detect problems”) will notice on the fly if quantities are being extracted. above the permissions granted. This monitoring of collections will allow us to know in real time the resources extracted and consumed, which will help to know on the fly if more is being consumed and where.
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