Irrigation district maps available
For more information regarding this subject, contact:
Guy Fipps
(979) 845-7454
g-fipps@tamu.edu
Rehabilitation for outdated and leaky irrigation canals and ditches in the Lower Rio Grande Valley just got a little easier with the release of maps from Geographic Information Systems (GIS) databases by Texas Cooperative Extension.
"These are very attractive maps, suitable for framing based on very detailed GIS databases and include the entire water distribution networks, where canals and pipelines are, the current conditions, lining materials, widths, depths, or the diameter of pipelines," said Guy Fipps, Extension agricultural engineer.
"It is one of the main, most important things we have to do before rehabilitation planning begins at the district and regional levels," he said. GIS databases also can be used for creating maps for daily operations and maintenance of districts, solving boundary disputes, projecting water use patterns, as well as redesigning canals and pipelines needed because of continuing city growth.
Funding for this work is supported in part by the Rio Grande Initiative. The critical nature of the water supply situation and demand from urban and industrial growth prompted the beginning of the project in 1996.
Irrigation districts use on average about 1 million acre-feet of water each year. he said. An acre-foot is the amount of water it would take to cover an acre of land one feet deep with water. It is estimated that about 220,000 acre-feet–which is otherwise lost to leaky canal and pipeline systems in irrigation districts along the Valley–could be recovered by improvements, he said.
This amount of water is about equal to what cities are currently using and would be enough to meet their expected demand in the year 2050, Fipps said.
A few of the Lower Rio Grande Valley’s 29 official water districts have GIS technicians on their staffs to generate this type of information, but most do not, Fipps said.
The last official map of the districts was produced in the 1950s and is tremendously outdated, he explained. In 2000, Cooperative Extension generated other maps of the districts, but these did not have the detail of the maps that were recently made available, he said.
Current maps can be ordered by visiting Extension’s bookstore online at http://tcebookstore.org.
