23 May 2016

Global Map of Irrigation Areas (Latest ver 5.0)

Now, the Latest Global Map of Irrigation Areas (Latest version 5.0) is available as a FREE download. The map shows the amount of area equipped for irrigation around the turn of the 20th century in percentage of the total area on a raster with a resolution of 5 minutes. The area actually irrigated was smaller, but is unknown for most countries. A special note has to be made for Australia and India where the map shows the total area actually irrigated. This is due to the fact that statistics collected in Australia and India refer to actually irrigated area as opposed to statistics with area equipped for irrigation which are collected in most other countries. An explanation of the different terminology to indicate areas under irrigation is given in the glossary.

For the GIS-users the map is distributed in two different formats:
  • as zipped ASCII-grid that can be easily imported in most GIS-software that support rasters or grids;  

  • and, to accommodate people who use GIS-software that doesn't support rasters or grids, as a zipped ESRI shape file.

The documentation of the map includes an explanation of the methodology, information per country, an assessment of the map quality, and references to the background and history of the irrigation mapping project. Users of Google Earth can see the Global Map of Irrigation Areas as an overlay by opening this file in Google Earth.
Sample Map 1
Sample Map 2

The map is generated as a grid and distributed with the following characteristics:


Projection Geographic
Number of columns 4320
Number of rows 2160
North Bounding Coordinate 90 degrees
East Bounding Coordinate 180 degrees
South Bounding Coordinate -90 degrees
West Bounding Coordinate -180 degrees
Cell size 5 minutes,  0.083333 decimal degrees
NODATA values Cells without irrigation are characterised by NODATA (-9), it does not mean that there was no data for these cells



Map versions
arrowVersion 5 - Global update to map version 5.0
arrowVersion 4.0.1 - Irrigation in Africa, Europe and Latin America
arrowVersion 4.0 - Pre-release of map version 4.0
arrowVersion 3.0  - An update for North America
arrowVersion 2.2 - An update for Asia
arrowVersion 2.1 - Updates for Africa and Oceania
arrowVersion 2.0 - An update for Latin America and Europe
arrowVersion 1.0 - A Digital Global Map of Irrigated Areas

Click here to access the Download page
Posted by Moderator at 12:07 AM

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