Optimal Sites Identification for Rainwater Harvesting in Northeastern Guatemala by Analytical Hierarchy Process

Abstract

The Guatemala's rural population have limited resources, high vulnerability to climate change, traditional agriculture practices and adversely affected by water scarcity. These problems engender the need for further economic development and imposed pressure on the existing water resources. In response, Rain Water Harvest (RWH) is the measure as an alternative source towards water shortage problem and a decrease in groundwater extraction. However, the identification of optimal sites for RWH is an important step to maximize the amount of water harvested and minimize the ecological impact. In this study, an Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) was used to determinate optimal sites using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in order to integrate spatial information. Physical and socioeconomic features were main decision criteria along with six sub-criteria: potential runoff; land use; soil texture; slope; distance from agricultural land; and distance from roads. In the investigation, several different criteria with different AHP structures were utilized to assess the flexibility of structures. The result maps with respect to different criteria and AHP structurs are overlaid in a systematic scheme to identify the most suitable site for RWH project. The results identified four sites as optimally suitable and eight as highly suitable. The total 424,070.81 m 3 volume of water can be potentially harvested from these optimally and highly suitable sites. The study

Rainwater Harvesting for Agricultural Irrigation: An Analysis of Global Research

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Application of RS/GIS in Conservation Studies for Surface and Groundwater Harvesting in Cold Arid Regions of Northwestern Himalayas

“…The criteria chosen for surface water harvesting in this research were five in number (table 12) encompassing landuse/land-cover, slope, soil texture, flow accumulation and rainfall. The weights of each thematic layer were given according to the method adopted by Wu et al (2018). The final suitability map was obtained by overlaying all these maps using weighted overlay sum in ArcGIS 10.4.1.…”

“…For agriculture purposes, it is a method for inducing, collecting, storing and conserving local surface runoff in arid and semi-arid regions (Prienz and Singh, 2001). Remote sensing (RS) and Geographic Information System (GIS) complement each other for selecting suitable sites for water harvesting structures (Ziadat et al, 2006;Forzieri et al, 2008;Chiu et al, 2015;Mahmoud et al, 2016;Wu et al, 2018). These techniques will therefore be useful as a preliminary method/applied as a first step for identifying suitable sites for water harvesting.…”

Runoff Harvesting Site Suitability Analysis for Wildlife in Sub-Desert Regions

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