WaterBalanceR: An R-Package for estimating water balance for starch potatoes in Germany based on NDVI values provided by Sentinel-2, PlanetScope or DJI Phantom 4 Multispectral UAV

As water is usually a limited resource in agriculture, it needs to be saved as best as possible. Starch potatoes in NE Germany need to be irrigated with about 80 - 120 mm during a vegetation period depending on climate conditions. Here, agriculturists often over- or underestimate the potatoes needs of water, so there is a potential for optimization. WaterBalanceR is an R-Package to create maps showing daily, spatially distributed water balance for starch potatoes in NE Germany and beyond. NDVI data needs to be derived from either preprocessed DJI Phantom 4 Multispectral or PlanetScope satellite data or Sentinel-2 satellite data. Any further information like reference evapotranspiration can automatically be downloaded from German Weather Service (DWD) and processed within the package. Besides, there is also a tool included to download and process irrigation data from "Raindancer", if the user has got a subscription for it. The model output can show a high spatial resolution map with a default of 5 m, so an irrigation on a pricision farming scale can be applied, depending on the individual need of water in every pixel. As the output is exported either as a portable network graphics (.png) and as Shapfiles (.shp), there as is solution that be can helpful for supporting decisions at first glance as well as for further development.