Miguel A. Moreno

• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at University of Castilla-La Mancha

Land use and water resources are closely linked. Every single type of land use has a different influence on the hydrologic cycle, consequently impacting the people and the natural resources. The use of advanced technologies, for example monitoring the agricultural resources with remote sensing, offers the possibility to assess the water demand, to...

Close-range remote sensing techniques employing multispectral sensors on unoccupied aerial vehicles (UAVs) offer both advantages and drawbacks in comparison to traditional remote sensing using satellite-mounted sensors. Close-range remote sensing techniques have been increasingly used in the field of precision agriculture. Planning the flight, incl...

In arid and semi-arid regions, irrigation is crucial to mitigate water stress and yield loss. However, the overexploitation of water resources by the agricultural sector together with the climate change effects can lead to water scarcity. Effective regional water management depends on estimating irrigation demand using maps of irrigable areas or na...

This work focuses on the automatic identification of forest fire risk areas along high-voltage power lines through the development of a tool and its validation on a real forest area. The tool allows one to automate the whole process, which includes the classification of the point cloud, the computation of the catenary of the wires using different c...

Because of climate change and the scarce availability of natural resources there is a need to develop sustainable intensification strategies intended for optimizing water use in vineyards. In this study, water regime, fertilization and soil management practices were assessed in terms of vineyard water use, by evaluating the inter-row and crop line...

Global awareness of environmental issues has boosted interest in renewable energy resources, among which solar energy is one of the most attractive renewable sources. The massive growth of PV plants, both in number and size, has motivated the development of new approaches for their inspection and monitoring. In this paper, a rigorous drone photogra...

Yield estimation in vineyards is an essential issue for performing cropping practices to reach the desired production quality or quantity. Sporadic manual measurements have been traditionally made. In the last decade, vegetation indices (VIs) and geometric parameters obtained from unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery have been related to different...

In the context of a changing climate, monitoring agricultural systems is becoming increasingly important. Remote sensing products provide essential information for the crop classification application, which is used to produce thematic maps. High-resolution and regional-scale maps of agricultural land are required to develop better adapted future st...

The development of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and light sensors has required new approaches for high-resolution remote sensing applications. High spatial and temporal resolution spectral data acquired by multispectral and conventional cameras (or red, green, blue (RGB) sensors) onboard UAVs can be useful for plant water status determination an...

High-resolution remote sensing imagery by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has been used as a tool for the environmental management of natural resources. Monitoring programmes that evaluate the ecological status of water bodies according to the Water Framework Directive (WFD) involve significant costs and sampling efforts that can be reduced by usin...

Photovoltaic solar energy is becoming very important globally due the benefits of their use. Climate change is resulting in frequent climatic variations that have a direct effect on the energy production in photovoltaic installations, so their good management is essential. This can be a big problem, for example, in photovoltaic pumping systems wher...

In countries characterized by arid and semi-arid climates, a precise determination of soil moisture conditions on the field scale is critically important, especially in the first crop growth stages, to schedule irrigation and to avoid wasting water. The objective of this study was to apply the operative methodology that allowed surface soil moistur...

Energy for water abstraction limits the viability of some irrigable areas. Increasing efficiency and introducing renewable energy can reduce energy cost. Solar pumping is a widely recognized renewable energy solution. These pumping systems suffer special wear out due to sudden changes and for having working conditions far from the nominal points. T...

Climate change is a reality, and irrigated agriculture is a significant human activity that contributes to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and, therefore, to global warming. Traditionally, the carbon footprint associated with GHG emissions has been computed by fixed electrical energy transformation rates (kgCO2e kWh⁻¹). However, this transformation...

In a world where the availability of water is decreasing, its use must be thoroughly optimized. Irrigated agricultural systems, as the main user of the planet's fresh water, must improve its management and save as much of this scarce resource as possible. However, the heterogeneity of these complex systems that are frequently organized in water use...

The availability of a great amount of remote sensing data for precision agriculture purposes has set the question of which resolution and indices, derived from satellites or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), offer the most accurate results to characterize vegetation. This study focused on assessing, comparing, and discussing the performances and lim...

Earth Observation (EO) imagery is difficult to find and access for the intermediate user, requiring advanced skills and tools to transform it into useful information. Currently, remote sensing data is increasingly freely and openly available from different satellite platforms. However, the variety of images in terms of different types of sensors, s...

Global energy consumption and costs have increased exponentially in recent years, accelerating the search for viable, profitable, and sustainable alternatives. Renewable energy is currently one of the most suitable alternatives. The high variability of meteorological conditions (irradiance, ambient temperature, and wind speed) requires the developm...

Water and energy are essential resources to ensure the productivity of agricultural irrigation systems: the former because of its limited availability, the latter because of both the environmental impacts of CO2 emissions and its cost that, in some cases, could threaten the activity of irrigation. It is becoming more critical to use the right amoun...

The availability of an unprecedented amount of open remote sensing data, such as Sen-tinel-1 and-2 data within the Copernicus program, has boosted the idea of combining the use of optical and radar data to improve the accuracy of agricultural applications such as crop classification. Sentinel-1's Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) provides co-and cross...

In viticulture, it is critical to predict productivity levels of the different vineyard zones to undertake appropriate cropping practices. To overcome this challenge, the final yield was predicted by combining vegetation indices (VIs) to sense the health status of the crop and by computer vision to obtain the vegetated fraction cover (Fc) as a meas...

The use of irrigation water extracted from aquifers with submerged pumps is essential to ensure agricultural production mainly in water-scarce regions.. However, the use of the water source requires of a considerable energy consumption by water user associations (WUAs) being key factor to consider due to their high share of total management, operat...

The launch of Sentinel-2A and B satellites has boosted the development of many applications that could benefit from the fine resolution of the supplied information, both in time and in space. Crop classification is a necessary task for efficient land management. We evaluated the benefits of combining Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2A information for irriga...

Nowadays, irrigation is becoming an activity of precision, whereby it is necessary to combine information collected from various sources to manage resources in an optimal way. New management strategies, such as big data techniques, sensors, artificial intelligence, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and new technologies in general, are becoming more re...

Nowadays, irrigation is becoming an activity of precision, whereby it is necessary to combine information collected from various sources to manage resources in an optimal way. New management strategies, such as big data techniques, sensors, artificial intelligence, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and new technologies in general, are becoming more re...

The carbon footprint and energy cost of irrigation are increasing due to the modernization of irrigation systems, which also necessitates highly efficient use of water resources. Alternatives to conventional energy sources to power irrigation systems are renewable sources, primarily photovoltaic energy. Photovoltaic energy has the main disadvantage...

Pumping systems are the largest energy consumers in center pivot irrigation systems. One action to reduce energy consumption is to adjust the pumping pressure to that which is strictly needed by using variable speed drives (VSDs). The objective of this study was to determine the feasibility of including VSDs in pumping systems that feed center pivo...

The 3D digital characterization of vegetation is a growing practice in the agronomy sector. Precision agriculture is sustained, among other methods, by variables that remote sensing techniques can digitize. At present, laser scanners make it possible to digitize three-dimensional crop geometry in the form of point clouds. In this work, we developed...

Several strategies have been developed for improving water use efficiency in agriculture. The effectiveness of such strategies are commonly assessed using classical methods based on ground measurements. However, most of these are high-cost, time-consuming and invasive methods that, due to its punctual nature, may not reflect the high crop variabili...

With the increasing competitiveness in the vine market, coupled with the increasing need for sustainable use of resources, strategies for improving farm management are essential. One such effective strategy is the implementation of precision agriculture techniques. Using photogrammetric techniques, the digitalization of farms based on images acquir...

In pressurized irrigation networks that use underground water resources, submersible pumps are one of the highest energy consumers. The objective of this paper was to develop a decision support system, implemented in MATLAB®, to reduce the energy consumption of the water abstraction process, from an aquifer to a reservoir in existing wells, by inst...

This article describes the implementation of two segmentation algorithms in combination with the Triangular Greenness Index (TGI) derived from images obtained from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), with the objective of segmenting shadow, soil and vegetation data obtained from a commercial vineyard cv. Cabernet Sauvignon. The importance of this seg...

This manuscript presents a comparison of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) obtained with multispectral cameras versus four indices obtained from RGB sensors for the identification of soil and vegetation in images captured with an unmanned aerial vehicle. This comparison was made using the NDVI as ground truth, obtaining 2 classes of dat...

The Alboraj shallow, permanently flooded lake is located in Tobarra village (Albacete province, SE Central Spain). It is a microrreserve included within the 'Saladares de Cordovilla y Agramón y Laguna de Alboraj (Albacete)' Special Area of Conservation of the EU Natura 2000 network. This work analyses historic and recent evolution of the lake in te...

Remote sensing techniques allow monitoring the Earth surface and acquiring worthwhile information that can be used efficiently in agro-hydrological systems. Satellite images associated to computational models represent reliable resources to estimate actual evapotranspiration fluxes, ET a , based on surface energy balance. The knowledge of ET a and...

Biomass monitoring is one of the main pillars of precision farm management as it involves deeper knowledge about pest and weed status, soil quality, water stress, and yield prediction, among others. This research focuses on estimating crop biomass from high-resolution red, green, blue imaging obtained with an unmanned aerial vehicle. Onion, as one...

Proper control and planning of water resource use, especially in those catchments with large surface, climatic variability and intensive irrigation activity, is essential for a sustainable water management. Decision support systems based on useful tools involving main stakeholders and hydrological planning offices of the river basins play a key rol...

A decades-long policy for irrigation Telemetry and Remote Control (TM/RC) systems in Spain has led to installations for approximately 260 Water Users Associations (WUAs), with a total estimated area of 1.0 M ha of agricultural land. This is believed to be the largest deployment of such technologies in the world. These systems have been installed in...

En climas semi-áridos, la disponibilidad de agua en el suelo es el principal limitante de los rendimientos de los cultivos influyendo además de manera notable sobre la calidad de las producciones. La práctica del fertirriego es frecuentemente empleada en estas situaciones y en particular en la fruticultura y horticultura intensiva que tiene que hac...

In many regions, water resource scarcity has required adapting irrigated agriculture towards more efficient water distribution networks and irrigation systems. These systems, however, have higher energy requirements. To overcome this problem, a new semi-arranged demand model combining network sectoring and critical points have been developed. The m...

Water stress, which affects yield and wine quality, is often evaluated using the midday stem water potential (Ψstem). However, this measurement is acquired on a per plant basis and does not account for the assessment of vine water status spatial variability. The use of multispectral cameras mounted on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is capable to cap...

The acquisition, processing, and interpretation of thermal images from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is becoming a useful source of information for agronomic applications because of the higher temporal and spatial resolution of these products compared with those obtained from satellites. However, due to the low load capacity of the UAV they need...

The application of geomatic products in environmental and agricultural applications directly depends on the cost of obtaining these products. This cost is primarily affected by the cost of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and the image acquisition and treatment processes that are conducted to obtain the geomatic products. In this study, a methodology...

A software tool has been developed to support decision-making in optimising the design of pressurised irrigation systems (sprinkler and drip irrigation) for agricultural fields with sub-plots of any shape or topography. The tool determines the design with minimum total water application cost (CT) (investment + operation). This study analysed the ef...

Improving energy and hydraulic performance of large-scale pressurized irrigation is now perceived as a very pressing need, after large budgets have been allocated into systems modernization. This paper tackles this priority area by developing a management oriented multi-step methodology, that integrates different existing models, to sector the syst...

Optimal reservoir sizing in on-demand irrigation networks with a minimum cost was obtained, taking into account the variability of pressure and flow rate demanded by the network during the irrigation season. With this aim, a model called DRODIN (Design of Reservoirs of regulation in On-Demand Irrigation Networks) was developed under a holistic appr...

The energy efficiency of pumping stations in irrigation networks was examined using a methodology to determine the optimum pumping station regulation. The methodology was developed in the MATLAB® environment using the EPANET® toolkit and developed using three on-demand irrigation networks located in the Castilla—La Mancha region of Spain. In each i...

A tool named DOPIR (Dimensioning Of Pressurized IRrigation) was developed to optimize the process of water abstraction from an aquifer for pressurized irrigation systems. This tool integrates the main factors throughout the irrigation process, from the water source to the emitter. The objective is to minimize the total cost of water abstraction and...

Real-time irrigation scheduling improves irrigation water management and achieves higher irrigation system performance. This scheduling requires the prediction of daily reference evapotranspiration (ETo), which has been performed in some areas by using the Hargreaves-Samani (HS) equation or the Penman-Monteith (PM) equation with all of the required...

The development of tools focused on the management of branched irrigation networks is important for the efficient use of water and energy resources. The objective of this paper is to develop and validate a methodology and an Optimum Regulation of Pumping Stations (ORPS) tool to estimate the pressure head at all the nodes of an irrigation network ba...

The aim of this study was to develop a DSS tool named DC-WAT, which linked with the already developed PRESUD tool, aims to optimize, in a holistic manner, the process of water extraction from an aquifer and its application in plot with a pressurized irrigation systems, obtaining the minimum total water application cost (CT) (operation (Cop) + inves...

In Spain, farmers and water user authorities have applied a variety of approaches in modernizing irrigation systems to address the delicate balance between water and energy use. This review presents the technical aspects of this process. This delicate balance is strongly manifested when replacing openchannel, gravity-based systems with pressurized...

Centre pivots are one of the most widespread irrigation systems in the world. The aim was to develop a tool to optimise the design and management of the water distribution and centre pivot systems seeking to minimise water application cost per unit area (CT), including investment (Ca), operation (Ce), and maintenance costs. With this aim, two optio...

The aim of the current research was to analyse the effect of four water irrigation treatments (1·20, 1·00, 0·80 and 0·60 of the crop water requirement) on the relationships among leaf area index (LAI), radiation use efficiency (RUE) and green canopy cover in a potato crop ( Solanum tuberosum L.) cv. Agria. The crop was established in a commercial p...

Los objetivos es dar soporte a actividades docentes prácticas relacionadas con los estudios impartidos en la ETSIAM. Parciales: • Puesta en practica de conocimientos (Alumnos). • Mejorar el seguimiento de la docencia (Profesores). • Interrelación de todos los colectivos de la Escuela (PDI – PAS – Alumnos) • Desarrollo de ideas de concienciación y s...

Leaf area is one of the most important parameters for characterizing crop growth and development, and its measurement is useful for examining the effects of agronomic management on crop production. It is related to interception of radiation, photosynthesis, biomass accumulation, transpiration and gas exchange in crop canopies. Several direct and in...

Leaf area is one of the most important parameters for characterizing crop growth and development, and its measurement is useful for examining the effects of agronomic management on crop production. It is related to interception of radiation, photosynthesis, biomass accumulation, transpiration and gas exchange in crop canopies. Several direct and in...

In this paper, the focus was on the study of the management of irrigation networks, and a tool was implemented in the MATLAB® environment and developed using the EPANET® toolkit to minimize the energy costs at the pumping station. The tool was validated in an on-demand irrigation network located in Tarazona de La - Mancha (Albacete, Spain). Several...

Leaf area index (LAI), green canopy cover (GCC), and canopy volume (V) are associated with grape vigor, quality, and yield. Thus, analyzing these parameters throughout the growing season may help optimize site-specific management of grape vineyards. Because direct measurements of LAI are destructive, tedious, and not repeatable on the same vine, de...

Generally, most pressure irrigation systems require efficient management of water and energy, particularly in systems installed on golf courses. Golf courses have high water requirements throughout the year because the grass has to be maintained in optimum conditions for adequate play development and for aesthetic reasons. Thus, the duration and fr...

There are many aspects of crop management that might benefit from aerial observation. Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platforms are evolving rapidly both technically and with regard to regulations. The purpose of this study was to acquire images with conventional RGB cameras using UAVs and process them to obtain geo-referenced ortho-images with the a...

Water authorities are required to have a survey of large woody debris (LWD) in river channels and to manage this aspect of the stream habitat, making decisions on removing, positioning or leaving LWD in a natural state. The main objective of this study is to develop a new methodology that assists in decision making for sustainable management of riv...

Changing from old open channel distribution systems to pressurized irrigation networks to improve wateruse efficiency has involved an increase in energy consumption. As total energy costs have significantly increased in recent years, modernization is sometimes an additional problem for farmers because it has led to increased water-related costs. Se...

There are several methodologies for obtaining and processing geospatial data with the aim of generating 3D models that represent reality. Thus, it is necessary to analyse the performance and capabilities of each methodology and its integration into archaeological heritage documentation. This paper analyses and compares the generation of 3D archaeol...

MATLAB™ software named PRESUD (Pressurized Subunit Design) was developed to identify the optimum solid set sprinkler irrigation subunit design with a criterion of minimizing the annual water application cost (CT). This CT is defined as the cost per cubic meter of water applied to the soil for crop use. In this study, only rectangular subunits are c...

Irrigation not only has been a key factor for the development and maintenance of human societies but it still plays this role now and it is foreseen that in the future as well. Its evolution has been constrained to the advance in knowledge on matters regarding Agronomy and Water Engineering and in technology however, many challenges deserve further...

Matlab software named PRESUD (Pressurized Subunit Design) was developed to identify the optimum microirrigation subunit design using the annual water application cost per unit of irrigated area (C T). This is defined as the cost per cubic meter of water applied to the soil for crop use, calculated as the sum of investment, maintenance, energy, and...