Developing A Decision Support System For On - Farm Water Management In Sri Lanka

Abstract

Scarcity of Water resource is getting more and more serious to the irrigated Agriculture and ecological system in Sri Lanka. Improvement of irrigation water management is an important measure to save water and increase water use efficiency (WUE). Decision making on irrigation is one of the most complicated activities undertaken by irrigation planners, managers, marketing agents, manufacturers, academics and farmers. Therefore, a Decision Support System (DSS) has been developed to improve the On-Farm Water Management. This study was conducted to develop a user-friendly DSS, using appropriate computer technologies to make available the irrigation-related informationto Sri Lanka. This package allows retrieval facilityfor informationon major soil types and their properties, rainfall and reference crop evapotranspiration for different locations of SriLanka. Further, for thecalculation of cropwater requirementsandirrigationscheduling a facility was made to link the CROPWAT programme. Also, this software package provides recommendation on irrigationmethodsuitable for a particularlocationand crop based on infiltration rate, hydraulic conductivity, available water capacity and irrigation water quality. In addition to that, details on irrigation expertise and training tools are provided for academic and research interests. It is hoped that this research has adequately demonstrated the potential value of irrigation information. And some other necessary resources will be found for further development of this work to benefit the wider irrigation community.