Model Tropical Legume Trees for Reversing Soil Degradation as a Solution for Increasing Rural Farmers Income by GIS Analysis: A Case Study - Meegahakivul, Sri Lanka

Abstract

Poverty in rural areas of developing countries is one of the major global issues. Economic growth in rural areas of Sri Lanka has been significantly lower than in the urban areas, especially around Colombo and principally excluded the agricultural sector. Aconsiderable proportion of rural livelihoods still depend mainly on agriculture, facing soil degradation and erosion. An important contribution towards a sustainable development of rural areas in Sri Lanka is thus to improve soil quality to enable sustainable agricultural development. Meegahakivula is one of such area has been selected to investigate and is highly undulated. The area is investigated in an interdisciplinary approach by three partners such as agronomy, socioeconomic and Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System (GIS). The incorporation of Gliricidia sepium leaves as green manure is believed to improve soil quality by rising both soil nitrogen and organic matter content. The by-products of the trees contribute to an improved income. The socioeconomic component deals with the potential enhancement of income and its importance within the farming systems. Incorporation of Gliricidia sepium in lands with different slopes categories will be analyzed by use of image processing in photogrammetric techniques including the integration of spatial data with agronomic and socioeconomic data in GIS.