Bio
Agricultural Engineer from the University of Lisbon, Portugal (ISA-UL), PhD from Federal High School of Technology, Zurich Switzerland (ETH). Prof. Emeritus of the University of Lisbon. Dr.h.c., the University Angel Kanchev, Rousse, Bulgaria. Director of research projects in Europe, Asia and Latin America and Consultant of FAO, UNDP, UNESCO, mainly on irrigation, evapotranspiration and vegetation water use, droughts and water scarcity. Co-Author of FAO Irrig Drain pap 56 on Guidelines for Crop Water Requirements, with more than 40 000 citations. Member of Scientific/Professional Academies of Portugal, Italy, France, the USA, iAABE, and European AWRES; Vice president Hon. ICID, President Hon. CIGR, and recipient of numerous awards from China, Egypt, Equador, India, Italy, Mexico, and Spain (H= 83). Author/Co-author of 400 papers in journals and books, Author/Editor of more than 40 books on irrigation engineering and management and water availability, drought and water scarcity.

Bio
Agricultural Engineer from the University of Lisbon, Portugal (ISA-UL), PhD from Federal High School of Technology, Zurich Switzerland (ETH). Prof. Emeritus of the University of Lisbon. Dr.h.c., the University Angel Kanchev, Rousse, Bulgaria. Director of research projects in Europe, Asia and Latin America and Consultant of FAO, UNDP, UNESCO, mainly on irrigation, evapotranspiration and vegetation water use, droughts and water scarcity. Co-Author of FAO Irrig Drain pap 56 on Guidelines for Crop Water Requirements, with more than 40 000 citations. Member of Scientific/Professional Academies of Portugal, Italy, France, the USA, iAABE, and European AWRES; Vice president Hon. ICID, President Hon. CIGR, and recipient of numerous awards from China, Egypt, Equador, India, Italy, Mexico, and Spain (H= 83). Author/Co-author of 400 papers in journals and books, Author/Editor of more than 40 books on irrigation engineering and management and water availability, drought and water scarcity.

Bio
Dr. Richard Allen has 40+ years of experience in evapotranspiration (ET) measurement and calculation and irrigation technology. He has been a pioneer in developing surface energy balance determination by satellite and is the codeveloper of the METRIC, eeFLUX and eeMETRIC processing systems. Allen has applied the METRIC process to a wide variety of application areas, including thirty US states and eight countries. Allen has taught university courses and training workshops on irrigation design, hydraulics, hydrology, evapotranspiration, crop coefficients, micrometeorology and surface energy balance processes. He has published more than 170 refereed papers and has an H-index of 81. He was the lead author of the 1998 edition of the FAO56 publication on Crop Evapotranspiration. The FAO56 publication has been cited in the literature more than 40,000 times.

Bio
Paula Paredes (Assistant Professor) has been conducting research on crop water requirements, soil water modelling, and irrigation scheduling using real-time data and weather forecasts. She has also been working on crop growth modelling and water productivity. She is the author (or co-author) of 82 SCOPUS-indexed papers (h-index: 38). She is an Associate Editor of the ISI journal Agricultural Water Management (since 2020) and Irrigation Science (since 2025) and the Academic editor of Agronomy (MDPI) (since 2024). She has contributed to the development of the soil–water balance model SIMDualKc, which adopts the dual crop coefficient approach. This model is used operationally and for research by various institutions in several countries, and has been the subject of numerous publications focusing on crop water use, irrigation scheduling, transpiration, yield, water productivity, and the impact of water stress and salinity.

Bio
Dr. Ramón López-Urrea) (PhD in Agricultural Engineering, UCLM, Spain, 2004). He is currently a Research Scientist with the Desertification Research Center (CIDE), CSIC-UV-GVA, in Valencia, Spain. His expertise (26-year career) includes determining crop evapotranspiration, the optimization of irrigation scheduling and improving water use efficiency and productivity in farming systems. Recently, he has focused on remote sensing-based phenotyping methods to assess crop ET, biophysical variables and the water status of wine grapes. During 2015-2017, he was the Director of two Spanish research and extension institutions (ITAP and FUNDESCAM). He has authored 65 papers in peer-reviewed journals with an impact factor (indexed in JCR). He has been an Associate Editor for the scientific journal Irrigation Science since July 2018 (Editorial Contribution Award 2025).