Potential land suitability identification for surface irrigation: in case of Gumara watershed, Blue Nile basin, Ethiopia

The identification of potential land for surface irrigation is very important to prevent food insecurity in a country. Therefore, the objectives of this work were to identify possible areas suitable for irrigation by analyzing parameters considered to be important in the fulfillment of the study by using the environment of the Geospatial Information System integrated with multi-criteria decision techniques. The researchers selected six important factors to complete the study. These six parameters were listed as proximity, topography, land use, soil texture class, soil depth, and soil drainage classes. The result of the study shows that, of the entire watershed area, 19.98% is highly appropriate, 30.98% is moderately appropriate, 47.18% is marginally appropriate, and 1.91% is not appropriate for the aforementioned purposes. Based on the topography of the watershed, the analysis indicates that 40,234% of the gradient in the Gumara watershed was very appropriate for the application of surface irrigation. On the other hand, based on the spatial analysis of the dynamics of land use/land cover dynamics in the area, the result indicates that 85.47% of the changes in land use/land cover were very appropriate; however, 0.04% of the dynamics of land use was not adequate for the implementation of surface irrigation for Gumara watershed. In general, the final thematic map of the study area shows that among the entire area of the watershed, 252.65 km2 of the area were very appropriate for the application of surface irrigation. Therefore, the combination of primary data collected from the field and remote sensing data that were analyzed in the geospatial information system environment help the outcome of this study and are recommended to be found throughout southern Gondar, Amhara, Ethiopia. Finally, the cross-tabulation of each parameter considered was calculated to assess the impact of each parameter on the final result.