干旱区生态环境知识资源中心

The pressure on water availability increases worldwide, and this is felt specially in the arid and semi-arid tracts. Several countries located in arid belts already use more surface and groundwater than is replenished naturally. Irrigated agriculture is a big water consumer and irrigation water needs to be utilized with greater concern. The Governments of developing countries are faced with a data crisis related to land and water management issues. Water balance determinations are compelled by their scale variations and cannot be straightforwardly interpreted from point observations. It is expected that remote sensing technologies can help understanding the rural environmental conditions (vegetation cover, leaf area index, land use; crop production, salinization) and the hydrological cycle when remotely sensed data is integrated with appropriate distributed hydrological models and GIS databases (rainfall, soil moisture, evapotranspiration, surface runoff, groundwater recharge). It is also expected that the productivity of water in river basins, water scarcity analysis and the sustainability of agro-ecosystems can be improved if large scale information systems based on emerging technologies will be made operational.