Geo information for agriculture sector in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Sri Lanka is predominantly considered as agriculture based country with one third (32.9% in 2011) of the labour force working in the agriculture sector with the usage of little less than half of total available land for cultivation. Yet, the total contribution from the agriculture sector to the total Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is very low at present. According to Central Bank reports contribution from agricultural sector to GDP is 11.9% in 2010 and 11.2% in 2011. On the other hand due to the growth of the population over the years has resulted in encroachment of agricultural land for other purposes. Hence it is quite evident that there is a gap between investment, production and harvest in the agriculture sector. One of the major factors that contribute to this gap is unavailability of information regarding the suitable land for cultivation. Most of the farmers tend to follow their ancestors in deciding on the land selection for cultivation as well as for crop selection and have little knowledge about the land usage in surrounding areas due to non-availability of Geo-data. At present finding of Geo-data related to agricultural sector has become a challenge in Sri Lanka because there is no automated mechanism to find such information. Survey Department is the only place that provides Geo-data with few branches spread through the country. The customers have to go to one of these places physically in order to fulfil their requirement. At these places process of providing Geo-data to customers is mostly manual based which is resource consuming, time wasting and a tedious work. Further it lacks the facility for handling customized requests. The approach presented in this paper is to provide an automated solution for generating Geo-data related to agriculture sector. GTIS System is capable of checking availability of agriculture based geographical information, clipping, converting, creating child Geo-Databases and validating the result using various Geo-tagging and image scaling techniques with a high accuracy and efficiency. The evaluation was jointly done with the Survey Department with the intention of testing the accuracy of the generated files compared to the files that will be provided by the Survey Department on customer request. The system showed 100% accuracy of the generated geo data and about 72% of the general users said that the development of this kind of a system makes to manage their requirements catered easily. Therefore we can conclude that having knowledge about the arable lands in the area and what sort of environment exists in the surrounding will be an added measure for decision making for farmers.