Land suitability for irrigation of small reservoirs using spatial techniques in the upper regions of Ghana

Abstract

Recent climatic variations have hindered the potential of irrigation in Sub‐Saharan Africa (SSA). This study presents a suitability analysis of irrigable areas for irrigation using spatial techniques. The focus of this paper was to examine regions that may be viable for irrigation for four small reservoirs constructed under the ‘One Village One Dam’ (1V1D) initiative. The thematic factors used were distance to water, soil type, soil depth, slope, pH, electrical conductivity, hydraulic conductivity, land use–land cover, organic carbon and organic matter. The land cover was classified using high‐resolution imagery from SAS Planet because of the small land size. The pairwise ranking found soil type to have an overall higher weight of approximately 15% and electrical conductivity to have the lowest weight. The highly suitable areas were found very close to the dam, and the permanently not suitable areas were located at the far end of the dam. From the area computation, it was found that the highly suitable regions in Kataa, Degri, Napaadi and Zansibulga were 10.52, 55.41, 1.01 and 3.77 ha, respectively. In conclusion, it was found that the majority of irrigable land was within the marginally to highly suitable class.