Irrigation Mapping and Water Sustainability

Agriculture accounts for over 70% of consumptive water use in the United States.  We’ve developed methods to identify agricultural irrigation across the conterminous U.S., generating the first nationwide annual maps of irrigated extent, available at field-level resolution.  Through partnerships with the U.S. Geological Survey, these data are helping to inform estimates of irrigated water use and efficiency.  Our current efforts are focused on furthering our understanding of irrigated field dynamics, system types, and sources to improve water use and management. 

Publications
Xie Y, HK Gibbs, TJ Lark. 2021. Landsat-based Irrigation Dataset (LANID): 30-m resolution maps of irrigation distribution, frequency, and change for the US, 1997–2017. Earth System Science Data. [Link]
Xie Y and TJ Lark. 2021. Mapping annual irrigation from Landsat imagery and environmental variables across the conterminous United States. Remote Sensing of Environment. [Abstract]
Xie Y, TJ Lark, J Brown, and HK Gibbs. 2019. Mapping irrigated cropland extent across the conterminous United States at 30 m resolution using a semi-automatic training approach on Google Earth Engine. ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. [Abstract]