Assessment of the Irrigation Capacity during the Dry Season Using Remote Sensing and Geographical Information (Case Study in the Binh Thuan Province, Vietnam)

Abstract

Today satellite system provides a main instrument supplying regular data on land inventory and monitoring of land use/land cover changes, in a timely manner. These data are keys to many ap-plications in different sectors: environment, forestry, hydrology, irrigation, agriculture, geology, resource management and planning. Using Landsat image and change detection, this paper pre-sents a method to extract changes of agricultural land, as the basis for the assessment and devel-opment of irrigation systems, which enhance production and protect land resources. During the period 1996-2014, the agricultural land in Binh Thuan decreased from 43.5% (in 1996) to 40.1% (February, 2014) of the total land surface in the province. However, the land area under cultiva-tion tends to decrease rapidly, from 25.7% in 1996 to 14.0% in 2014. Combining the results of land use change and assessing the capacity of the irrigation systems show which areas are fre-quently irrigated versus those are not. This allows proposing irrigation development needs con-tributing to more production while protecting land resources.