Dominican Republic

The total area equipped for irrigation in the Dominican Republic equals 4 873 434 tarea (306 442 ha) [DO01]. Area equipped for irrigation per province (in total 253 997 ha) was available from the AQUASTAT-library. The figures referred to year 1994 and were scaled to meet the total AEI reported for year 2010. The irrigated area per province estimated that way is visible in the table below and also can be downloaded as Dominican Republic irrigation areas in PDF or Dominican Republic irrigation areas in Excel.

Most of the irrigated areas are located in the western part of the country [DO02],[DO03]. Location and extent of the major irrigation schemes was digitized from maps in [DO03] and combined with areas classified as cropland in the MODIS land cover classification for year 2005 [DO04]. Irrigated area was assigned with the highest priority to areas mapped as irrigated in [DO03] and as cropland in [DO04]. The remaining irrigated area was assigned to pixels that were either irrigated on the maps in [DO03] or cropland in the MODIS land cover data set [DO04].

Total harvested area of irrigated crops was 296 128 ha in season 2003/2004, with rice as the major irrigated crop harvested on 160 102 ha (54 percent) [DO05]. About 22 percent of the AEI was irrigated with groundwater in year 1999 [DO06]. It was assumed that this percentage is also valid for current day conditions.

References

[DO01]: INDRHI. 2010. Distritos de Riego. Instituto Nacional de Recursos Hidráulicos (INDRHI), http://www.indrhi.gov.do/distrito.php, 28/02/2012.
[DO02]: CIAT. 1997. Distribution of rice in Latin America. http://www.gis.ciat.cgiar.org or http://www.grida.no/prog/global/cgiar/
[DO03]: Organizacion de los Estados Americanos. 1969. Reconocimiento y Evaluacion de los Recursos Naturales de la Republica Dominica. Report available from the AQUASTAT library.
[DO04]: MODIS Land Cover Group. 2009. Collection 5 Land Cover product (MOD12Q1). Department of Geography and Environment, Boston University, Boston, USA, ftp://crsftp.bu.edu/ modis/MOD12Q1_data/2005v5_umd_geog.bin.gz, 28/02/2012.
[DO05]: INDRHI. 2010. El Riego y la Producción Alimentaria. Instituto Nacional de Recursos Hidráulicos (INDRHI), http://www.indrhi.gov.do/bajoriego.php, 28/02/2012.
[DO06]: FAO. 2000. AQUASTAT country profile of the Dominican Republic. FAO, Rome, Italy.