Water and nutrient management: the Austria case study of the FATIMA H2020 project F. Vuolo 1† , L. Essl 1 , L. Zappa 1 , T. Sandén 2 and H. Spiegel 2 1 University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU), Vienna, Peter Jordan Straße 82, 1190 Vienna; 2 Austrian Agency for Health and Food Safety (AGES), Institute for Sustainable Plant Production, Department for Soil Health and Plant Nutrition The project “FArming Tools for external nutrient Inputs and water Management” (FATIMA, H2020-SFS2) is developing satellite-based methodologies and information to support effective and efficient water and nitrogen input recommendations in agricultural production. This paper focuses on nitrogen recommendation for winter cereals in Austria and presents preliminary findings from the 2015/16 crop growing season. The Nitrogen Nutrition Index was applied using an empirical relationship to derive dry mass from Leaf Area Index (LAI) and %N a from a chlorophyll index. Results showed a very high correlation between LAI and above ground dry mass (R 2 = 0.95) but a lower correlation between the chlorophyll index and %N a (R 2 = 0.24). Despite various indices tested, the relationship to estimate %N a remains weak. Additional field data and research are needed to further study this aspect. Keywords: Nitrogen, fertilizer, recommendation, remote sensing, Sentinel-2, Nitrogen Nutrition Index Introduction Over the last two decades many applications and techno- logies based on spatial information have been developed for the agricultural market. Automated guidance systems for tractors as well as a wide range of soil and crop sensors to monitor differences of plants and soils are based on the use of positioning systems and remote sensing. All these technologies are part of the wide field of precision agri- culture technologies (PAT) which were developed for fine scale agriculture to make it more efficient and adapted to heterogeneity of plant and soil. The application of fertilizer, seed rates, irrigation and plant protection can be managed according to the crop requirements to save input resources and make agriculture more sustainable. The project FATIMA (“FArming Tools for external nutrient Inputs and water Management”) is focusing on the provision of timely information on the temporal and spatial variable crop input requirements with a focus on nitrogen manage- ment. Austria is one of the seven countries with a designated pilot area “Marchfeld” in Lower Austria. A large number of manufacturers in Austria provide technical solutions for variable nitrogen applications based on sensor measure- ments. They are all based on the same principle: a sensor is placed on the tractor and derives information about the chlorophyll content in the leaves, which is corre- lated to the concentration of nitrogen in the plant. The information is either directly connected with a fertilizer applicator (“online systems”) or first converted to a map which then can be used to variably distribute nitrogen ferti- lizer (“offline systems”). The diversity of offered solutions in Austria is not reflected in uptake by users. Compared with other European countries like, Denmark (Fountas et al., 2005) or the UK (Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission, 2014) the rate of adoption of PAT for nutrient management is low. There is no exact data available, but the number of farms using either online or offline N-sensors in Lower Austria is estimated to be less than 1%. This can be explained by an average farm size of 55 ha in the area. A survey among farmers in Germany showed that the incentives to use variable-rate technologies (VRT) below a farm size of 100 ha are low (Reichardt and Jürgens, 2009). The main constraint for adoption is high cost (Busse et al., 2014; Kutter, Tiemann, Siebert, and Fountas, 2011; Nash, Korduan, and Bill, 2009) and uncertain economic benefits (Pannell, 2006). Therefore, an alternative approach to derive fertilizer recommendations based on satellite-based information, which is now affordable and with no maintenance or installation costs at the ground, could be suitable for the region and for a wider diffusion of the technology. Satellite-based maps can be used to respond to different needs (e.g. derive management zones) and they can be transferred to existing on-board navigation systems or ultimately integrated with controllers for automatic input management. In this work, Sentinel-2A data, which is the newest generation Earth observation (EO) satellite of the European Space Agency (ESA), is used. The satellite was launched in † E-mail: francesco.vuolo@boku.ac.at Advances in Animal Biosciences: Precision Agriculture (ECPA) 2017, (2017), 8:2, pp 400–405 © The Animal Consortium 2017 doi:10.1017/S2040470017000541 advances in animal biosciences 400