Abstracts Geography

Siting feasible water catchments for small irrigation projects in Western Honduras

by Jefferson Valencia Gómez

In Western Honduras, most of people live in rural areas under extreme conditions of poverty. This area is part of the Centro American dry corridor which is affected by droughts and, therefore, water scarcity. Access to water is limited; which affects human welfare and agricultural production. As a plausible solution, this thesis work provides a tool to identify feasible water catchments for small irrigation projects in Western Honduras based on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and surface features. This tool can support decision makers to address water catchments in the study area. Two versions of this tool were developed. Both desktop and online versions allow the user to find potential sites to take water from streams through hosepipes. The suggested paths, over which these hosepipes can be installed, are modeled by using the Least-Cost Path (LCP) approach. We contrasted the results provided by the tool with two actual cases. The results showed the potential of this tool to find possible water intakes different from the current cases. In both cases, the tool was capable of finding water intakes very close to the current sites. This thesis proves that the use of GIS technologies in combination with decision rules and surface features can provide a novel solution to the real problem of water scarcity in Western Honduras. Advisors/Committee Members: Casteleyn, Sven, Costa, Ana Cristina Marinho da, Huerta, Joaquín, Srinivasan, Raghavan.