Iraq’s westernmost province Anbar has severely suffered during the occupation and the fight against the so-called Islamic State (IS). While thousands of people have been displaced, the conflict has led to widespread destruction of basic infrastructure, such as the millennia old irrigation and drainage system. Even though, international donors did not lack the enthusiasm to invest in the system’s restoration, due to the lack of common monitoring data, tools and relevant capacities on side of the Anbar regional government, it proved challenging for the different stakeholders to identify, prioritise and monitor rehabilitation needs and related works. A problem the Restoration of Peace, Livelihoods and Economic Cycles in Anbar (RePLECA) program wanted to solve by developing a Geoinformation System (GIS) that enables the local Directorate of Water Resources (DoWR) to identify and monitor irrigation network rehabilitation and maintenance needs.
In a phased approach, a team consisting of the DoWR, Masae Analytics and GIZ started migrating the existing disparate datasets on the irrigation system to a fully open-source solution: first, paper maps and existing ArcGIS shapefiles were migrated to open-source GIS formats, enabling their rapid integration into a central database. In a second step, potential improvements in data management and data collection were identified, leading to the design of a new data model that now includes the maintenance and rehabilitation needs in addition to relevant geospatial features. By introducing a relational data model, the overall data quality could be highly improved and the potential for future human error has been minimized. In a third and final step the newly developed database was further populated by conducting data collection along more than 500 km of canals to capture the current maintenance and rehabilitation needs of regulators, outlets, canal linings and shoulders.
To improve cost-efficiency as well as to enable needs-based and context-sensitive implementation, the GIS includes a wide variety of open source tools, such as QGIS, PostgreSQL/PostGIS or Mergin Maps. Additionally, access to regularly updated open data, such as population density, urban development or ESA Sentinel-2 multispectral data has been included. Particularly, the multispectral data can be used to compute the Normalised Difference Moisture Index (NDMI), which can help identify problems in the water flow, triggering unplanned inspections and subsequent interventions. But also planned inspections and regular maintenance are part of the database, paving the way for improved planning of rehabilitation works.
Currently outside the scope of the activity but nevertheless relevant, the GIS could be further developed to automatically calculate and compare the NDMI to existing as well as open datasets. After calibration it is possible that the GIS automatically advises DoWR of potential problems in the irrigation system to trigger action on their side. Furthermore, the GIS could be made publicly accessible and data from further directorates could be included to improve data sharing.