Paper Info
Title
Global Satellite-Based ET Products for the Local Level Irrigation Management: An Application of Irrigation Performance Assessment in the Sugarbelt of Swaziland.
Abstract
Remote sensing techniques have been shown, in several studies, to be an extremely effective tool for assessing the performance of irrigated areas at various scales and diverse climatic regions across the world. Open access, ready-made, global ET products were utilized in this first-ever-countrywide irrigation performance assessment study. The study aimed at identifying 'bright spots', the highest performing sugarcane growers, and 'hot spots', or low performing sugarcane growers. Four remote sensing-derived irrigation performance indicators were applied to over 302 sugarcane growers; equity, adequacy, reliability and crop water productivity. The growers were segmented according to: (i) land holding size or grower scale (ii) management regime, (iii) location of the irrigation schemes and (iv) irrigation method. Five growing seasons, from June 2005 to October 2009, were investigated. The results show while the equity of water distribution is high across all management regimes and locations, adequacy and reliability of water needs improvement in several locations. Given the fact that, in general, water supply was not constrained during the study period, the observed issues with adequacy and reliability of irrigation in some of the schemes were mostly due to poor scheme and farm level water management practices. Sugarcane crop water productivity showed the highest variation among all the indicators, with Estate managed schemes having the highest CWP at 1.57 kg/m(3) and the individual growers recording the lowest CWP at 1.14 kg/m(3), nearly 30% less. Similarly center pivot systems showed to have the highest CWP at 1.63 kg/m(3), which was 30% higher than the CWP in furrow systems. This study showcases the applicability of publicly available global remote sensing products for assessing performance of the irrigated crops at the local level in several aspects.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.3390/rs11060705
REMOTE SENSING
Keywords
Field
DocType
ensemble,sugarcane,Southern Africa,water productivity,remote sensing,CMRSET,SSEBop
Irrigation management,Performance indicator,Growing season,Center pivot irrigation,Crop,Remote sensing,Equity (finance),Geology,Irrigation,Agricultural engineering,Water supply
Journal
Volume
Issue
Citations 
11
6
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
poolad karimi152.56
Bhembe Bongani200.34
Megan Leigh Blatchford300.68
Charlotte De Fraiture401.01