This paper reports the results of the project SIRIUS (Sustainable Irrigation water management and River-basin governance: Implementing User-driven Services) for the pilot area located in Southern Italy. SIRIUS is a research project funded by EU FP7 in the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) framework supporting the development of monitoring services through remote sensing and ICT technologies to deliver the service to the final users. SIRIUS is developing efficient water resource management services in support of food production in water-scarce environments. It addresses water governance and management in accordance with the vision of bridging and integrating sustainable development and economic competitiveness. The project is developing new services for water managers and food producers, and a range of additional information products in support of sustainable irrigation water use and management under conditions of water scarcity and drought. The aim of this paper is to describe the Earth observation dataset for the Italian pilot area and its use within the decision support system (DSS) SPIDER (System of Participatory Information, Decision-Support and Expert Knowledge for irrigation and River-basin water management). SPIDER is based on  open-source software to produce maps of the irrigation requirements of crops with different scales (from a single farm, field irrigation district to the entire watershed).

Keywords: water framework directive, irrigation; remote sensing; precision farming, water