In smart irrigation, reporting is the layer that turns telemetry data into decisions. Valve open/close events, flow measurements, soil moisture, EC, weather data and reference evapotranspiration (ET₀) are stored as timestamped records, putting the principle "you cannot manage what you do not measure" into practice.

Telemetry and data acquisition

Field devices typically transmit telemetry over low-power wireless protocols (LoRaWAN, NB-IoT, LTE-M) or wired control systems (Modbus, OPC UA, BACnet). On the cloud side, data is most often ingested via MQTT (ISO/IEC 20922) or HTTPS REST. Each sample packet carries at least the following fields:

  • timestamp — UTC, in ISO 8601 format.
  • device_id — unique device identifier (e.g. EUI-64).
  • metric — flow, pressure, moisture, valve_state, etc.
  • value, unit — value and unit (SI preferred).
  • quality — measurement quality / status code.

Time-series databases

For IoT reporting, time-series-optimised systems are preferred over relational databases. Common choices include:

  • InfluxDB — TSI-based, with Flux/InfluxQL.
  • TimescaleDB — PostgreSQL extension, hypertables.
  • Prometheus — metric scraping, short to medium term.
  • QuestDB, VictoriaMetrics — high ingest rates.

These systems generally provide downsampling, retention policies and continuous aggregations: per-second flow data may be retained for 30 days, per-minute averages for 1 year and hourly summaries for 5 years.

Water budgeting and loss analysis

In FAO-56 methodology, the daily water budget is calculated as ETc (crop evapotranspiration) minus effective rainfall; the irrigation requirement is assessed as the ratio of this deficit to the volume actually delivered to the root zone. In operational reporting, the difference between water applied and calculated requirement is tracked across the season. In water utilities, the IWA Water Balance framework separates real and apparent losses; the Infrastructure Leakage Index (ILI) makes a site's leakage performance comparable on an international scale.

ISO 14046 and water footprint

ISO 14046:2014 defines principles and requirements for assessing the water footprint of products, processes and organisations. In landscape and agricultural irrigation, this standard standardises reporting by separating abstraction (blue water), green water and pollution-driven indirect use (grey water). Under the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and ESRS E3 (Water and Marine Resources), this data may be required in corporate reporting.

Audit trail

Privileged user actions, manual interventions and automatic decisions should be recorded in an immutable (append-only) audit log. Each entry contains at least who, when, which device, which parameter and from which value to which value. This structure is the basic chain of evidence in public projects and tender audits.

Practical note: a monthly bill alone does not explain where the water went. Time-stamped, sensor-backed records at the zone and device level make the relationship between consumption and plant requirement visible. Variance analyses (planned vs actual) often deliver more value than the headline numerical saving.

Export and interoperability

Reports are typically delivered in CSV, Excel (XLSX), PDF/A and machine-readable JSON/Parquet formats. For enterprise integration with BI tools (Power BI, Grafana, Metabase), direct SQL/REST access is preferred. In agriculture, schemas such as ADAPT (AgGateway), ISOXML (ISO 11783-10) and, in landscape, Smart Data Models are widely used.

Regulatory reporting

In Türkiye, the General Directorate of Water Management and local authorities may require consumption and yield reports at various scales. In the EU, the Water Framework Directive (2000/60/EC) and national water-allocation systems require records on hourly or daily scales. Automatically generated, time-stamped and immutable reports are the practical answer to these obligations.