Developing a precision irrigation framework to facilitate smallholder dry-season farming in developing countries: A case study in northern Ghana

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Abstract

Changing climate has resulted in increasingly unreliable weather patterns with prolonged dry-seasons in some parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. Food production in these areas is under threat because the people depend mostly on rain-fed farming. Enabling dry-season farming, in light of the prolonged dry-seasons, is central to sustainable food production and poverty alleviation in these areas. Efficient water management is key to successful dry-season farming. Ideally, efficient irrigation water management should involve real-time monitoring of soil moisture (SM) to guide irrigation scheduling. However, farmers in these areas are mostly poor smallholder farmers without the financial capacity to instrument their farms for real-time SM monitoring. We present a precision irrigation framework (PIF) as a low-cost alternative to site-specific SM monitoring to guide irrigation scheduling. PIF applies machine leaning to integrate multi-scale ground-truth data and satellite imagery to create irrigation water management zones for an entire region. We demonstrate the strategy in the Pwalugu area in northern Ghana.

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Publication type Conference Paper
Publication Subtype Conference Paper
Title Developing a precision irrigation framework to facilitate smallholder dry-season farming in developing countries: A case study in northern Ghana
DOI 10.1190/segam2019-3216819.1
Year Published 2019
Language English
Publisher Society of Exploration Geophysicists
Contributing office(s) WMA - Earth System Processes Division
Description 5 p.
Larger Work Type Book
Larger Work Subtype Conference publication
Larger Work Title SEG Technical Program Expanded Abstracts 2019
First page 4804
Last page 4808
Country Ghana
Other Geospatial Pwalugu Project Area
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