AquaEquity

💎 Idea

Irrigation water across Southern Europe is a shared, finite resource — but it's allocated as if it weren't. Farmers irrigate on intuition or fixed schedules, water authorities have no real-time picture of usage, and aquifers drain while crops still hit moisture stress because water goes to the wrong field at the wrong time.

AquaEquity is a precision irrigation and water-fairness platform. It uses an Extended Kalman Filter to continuously estimate soil moisture and crop water stress at the per-farm level, then produces three things: precise irrigation recommendations, automatic stress alerts, and a fairness layer that tracks usage against quotas across a region. The Kalman approach is the differentiator — instead of threshold rules, it reasons about uncertainty, so irrigation decisions stay conservative when satellite revisits stretch or forecasts diverge from reality.

🛰️ EU space technologies

AquaEquity is built on Copernicus Sentinel-2, accessed through the Copernicus Data Space Statistical API. We derive NDVI as a proxy for canopy development (feeding the crop coefficient and evapotranspiration model) and NDMI/SWIR indices as an indirect soil-moisture signal. These enter the EKF as measurement updates with tuned noise to reflect that they're inferred, not directly sensed.

Between passes, the filter propagates state forward using a soil-water balance driven by weather data. That's the value-add: a single Sentinel-2 image is a snapshot, but coupled with a state estimator it becomes a continuously-updated picture of every field in the region — even on cloudy days and between revisits.

🌊 EU Space for Water

AquaEquity addresses the "managing water resources" challenge on two levels. At the farm level, uncertainty-aware satellite-grounded recommendations replace schedule-based irrigation, with preliminary simulations suggesting meaningful reductions in applied water without yield loss. At the regional level, the fairness analytics turn aggregate consumption into a transparent metric, giving authorities and cooperatives a basis for setting equitable quotas. Protecting a shared resource means reducing total draw and distributing it fairly — AquaEquity addresses both in one system.

🤼 Team

• Rade Micov - Connects backend with frontend, integrating the APIs and data flows that make the application alive and well-developed.
• Andrej Levkov - Writes the database schema and backend services — designs the system architecture and builds the endpoints that power the platform.
• Marko Panev - The mathematician behind it — brings explainable formulas — makes physical sense of the system as a whole.
• Leontina Paunovska - From researching scientific challenges to designing the logical flow and targeted visuals to create the best user experience.
• Evgenija Popchanovska - From building the frontend to showing how AquaEquity brings value — environmental, human and business.