Global map of irrigated areas

It’s not easy to find a good cartographic representation of the global irrigated land, therefore I made my own map using data from Meier et al. (2018).

The raw resolution of the above product is 30 arcsec, i.e. 1 pixel covers about 1 km by 1 km at equator. Here, I aim to represent the entire world in a single picture of say 1000 pixels wide, which means that 1 pixel would span about 40 km of land at the equator. Therefore I need to aggregate the original data to a lower resolution. Many people don’t realize that cartographic software like QGIS or ArcGIS will do this resampling under the hood with a default anti-aliasing method that may not work well with the data to represent, as shown below:

I like to aggregate data with hexagon grids because « hexagons are the most circular-shaped polygon that can tessellate to form an evenly spaced grid « . Thanks to the MMQGIS plugin it’s easy to generate a shapefile of continuous hexagons covering the Meier et al. layer. Here I worked in the Equal Earth projection because it retains the relative size of areas. Hence I first resampled the Meier et al. layer to Equal Earth at 800 m resolution using the nearest neighbor method. Then, I used the zonal statistics tool in QGIS to compute the « count » of irrigated pixels in every hexagon. Finally I computed the percentage of irrigated area by hexagon using the $area function in the field calculator available from the attribute table menu (percent irrigated = 100*800*800* « _count » / $area).

 

Using the same method we can aggregate the data by country.

Countries with the highest percentage of irrigated land:

  • Bangladesh (38%)
  • India (28%)
  • Pakistan (22%)

Countries with the largest irrigated area:

  • India (876’000 km²)
  • China (746’000 km²)
  • USA (287’000 km²)
Higher resolution version (download). Feel free to use the map under the license Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC-BY-NC-3.0).

Reference: Meier, J., Zabel, F., and Mauser, W.: A global approach to estimate irrigated areas – a comparison between different data and statistics, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 22, 1119–1133, https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-22-1119-2018, 2018.

Plus d'actualités

BIOMASS, the third launched satellite mission designed at CESBIO !

After SMOS in 2009, and VENµS in 2017, the CESBIO Laboratory is very proud to see its third proposed mission, Biomass, reach orbit. As always, it has been a long journey from the idea, at the beginning of the century, to the selection in 2013 as the seventh Earth Explorer Mission by ESA, to the […]

Satellite Stereoscopy for Water Resource Monitoring?

=> In arid or semi-arid regions, where irrigation is widespread, monitoring agricultural water resources is essential to anticipate shortages. These resources may come from large dams, small reservoirs, or groundwater aquifers. This is the case in the state of Telangana, in South India, where numerous large dams (shown in cyan blue in the figure below) […]

La stéréoscopie par satellite pour le suivi des ressources en eau ?

=> Dans les régions arides ou semi-arides, où l’irrigation est généralisée, le suivi de la ressource en eau agricole est primordial pour anticiper les pénuries. Cette ressource peut-être l’eau de grands barrages, de petits réservoirs ou provenant de l’aquifère. C’est le cas de l’état du Télangana, en Inde du Sud, où de nombreux grands barrages […]

Rechercher