The U.S. Embassy in Tashkent and the U.S. Department of the Interior co-sponsored the first of three sessions for the Ambassador’s Water Experts Program (AWEP) in Uzbekistan. The event, which focused on specific issues around agricultural water, included 94 participants from Tashkent Institute of Irrigation and Agricultural Mechanization Engineers (TIIAME), and its Bukhara and Karshi branches, the Scientific Research Institute of Irrigation and Water Problems, and the Ministry of Water Resources.
The AWEP presentation focused on agricultural irrigation methods, practices, and technologies in scarce water environments by looking at the unique experience of U.S. Department of Agriculture irrigation engineer Brent Draper in the American West. Draper also demonstrated specialized techniques the U.S. Government uses to measure snowpack and estimate water supply both for urban and agricultural use. Upcoming sessions will deepen participants’ knowledge of advanced water management techniques, with a focus on remote sensing, mapping croplands using multi-sensor big-data analytics, machine learning, and cloud computing, and hyperspectral vegetation indices.
