Author(s): Marcos Marina-Castello; Gabriel Marro-Gros; Ana Ruiz-Varona; Raquel Trillo-Lado

Linked Author(s):

Keywords: Imperial Canal of Aragon; Digital transformation; Flood irrigation; GIS; Irrigation monitoring

Abstract: Water is an essential resource, and the modernization of governance models is increasingly critical for its efficient management in regions facing water scarcity. In this paper is described how the digitalization process of traditional irrigation monitoring in the Imperial Canal of Aragon (CYA) is being performed, preserving its cultural significance to facilitate the transition from a traditional management system to a digital one. Traditional flood irrigation systems often rely on manual, handwritten logs to document daily water distribution. Specifically, in the CYA, irrigation events have been recorded for decades in the Adores book, a register maintained by canal guards. However, the potential of these records (water-demand patterns linked to crop type, topography or climatic conditions) remains limited by the lack of standardized spatial referencing or temporal precision. To address this, our approach defines a GIS-based irrigation network with topological rules that formalize relationships among canals, gates, and plots. The first phase involved diagnosing the existing workflow. The second phase involved analyzing the hierarchy and connectivity to construct a consistent topological network. The third phase developed a model to identify plot-level irrigation sequences computing irrigation periods. The last phase validated the method in a sector, identifying factors affecting data reliability, including record precision and user familiarity with digital tools. The proposed framework provides us with a reproducible pathway for modernizing traditional irrigation monitoring, focusing on how data can be structured, and digitized, enabling integration of historical records and future sensor-based monitoring. Moreover, the first experiments show that this framework significantly improves data integrity, spatial accuracy, and operational efficiency with respect to the traditional approach.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.64697/iahr.proc.hic2026.95

Year: 2026