TWISTT field campaign takes off in north-east Morocco: Drones over table grape and barley plots in Nador

From the FPN-UMP team led by Prof. Kamal Aberkani, the first UAV surveys are already feeding TWISTT’s multi-scale Earth Observation system designed to rethink water accounting in the Mediterranean.

In the agricultural plains north-east of Morocco, around Nador and Driouch, a team of researchers and students is pointing a drone at the sky and, paradoxically, learning how to better keep water in the ground. The flights are part of the early field campaigns of TWISTT — “Who TWISTs the Tap?”, a PRIMA-funded research project that is building a new multi-scale Earth Observation (EO) and modelling system to answer one of the most pressing questions for Mediterranean agriculture: who is using the water, where, and how much. Leading the Moroccan field component is Prof. Kamal Aberkani (Faculté Pluridisciplinaire de Nador – Université Mohammed Premier, FPN-UMP), TWISTT’s WP5 leader on sustainability assessment and the principal investigator for all UMP research activities in the project. Together with his team and
students, Prof. Aberkani has begun collecting UAV multispectral and thermal imagery over experimental parcels of table grape, barley and other cereals — high-value crops that are emblematic of the Nador–Driouch agricultural landscape and increasingly exposed to declining annual water resources and highly variable rainfall.

The drone footage shared this week — including 50-metre nadir views of trellised table grape and aerial scans of barley experimental parcels — is far more than visually striking. These flights feed directly into Work Package 1 of TWISTT, where FPN leads the collection of in-situ data at the irrigation-plot scale: Leaf Area Index (LAI), soil physical properties, root depth and growth, yield, biomass, photosynthesis, stress indices and soil moisture. Combined with satellite data from Copernicus Sentinel missions and ground geophysical measurements, this dataset will be used to calibrate energy-balance and soil-water-balance models that estimate evapotranspiration and, ultimately, irrigation needs.

Why TWISTT matters

Water is the limiting factor of Mediterranean agriculture, and current accounting methods often fail to distinguish between blue water — extracted from reservoirs, rivers and aquifers, mainly for irrigation — and green water, taken directly from the soil by crops. TWISTT proposes a physically based, EO-driven approach to make that distinction explicit, from the individual farm up to the catchment scale. The project also introduces geophysical measurements to look below the topsoil — addressing one of the biggest blind spots of microwave-based satellite soil moisture, which cannot penetrate beyond the first few centimetres.

In a video recorded between the experimental parcels, Prof. Aberkani himself describes the rationale of the campaign and the role of the Nador site within TWISTT — a clear example of the project’s co-development philosophy, which puts farmers, growers and local stakeholders at the centre from day one. Prof. Aberkani is, in fact, president of the association of table grape growers of the Nador and Driouch area, an asset that will help translate scientific outputs into practical irrigation recommendations and field demonstrations.

What comes next

The Moroccan campaign will continue across the 2026 growing season, with parallel field activities in Italy, Tunisia and Spain. Datasets, methodologies and open-source tools developed by the consortium will be released following FAIR principles — Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable — and validated together with farmers, water managers and policymakers along the supply chain. The aim is clear: to give Mediterranean stakeholders the information they need to decide, with evidence, who twists the tap, when, and how much.

About TWISTT — TWISTT (“Who TWISTs the Tap? Bridging soil–plant–atmosphere dynamics with advanced EO data to address water accounting in the Mediterranean”) is a research project funded under the PRIMA programme.

The consortium is coordinated by the Institute of Agricultural Sciences (ICA-CSIC, Spain), under the scientific lead of Dr. Hector Nieto, and brings together six partners across four Mediterranean countries: Politecnico di Milano (Italy), FPN – Université Mohammed Premier and Chouaib Doukkali University (Morocco), INRAT (Tunisia) and the Spanish geophysics company Xcalibur, which leads the project’s communication and dissemination activities. Four pilot regions — in Spain, Italy, Morocco and Tunisia — provide a balanced representation of the diverse climatic, hydrological and socio-economic conditions of the Mediterranean basin.