There are over 10 million acres of cropped land in California, representing substantial economic, resource use, and environmental significance for the state. Spatial data, including agricultural, urban, and managed wetland land use, consumptive use, irrigation method, permanent crop age, and recharge potential are essential for a number of regional and statewide regulatory, planning and resource management purposes. Accurate and timely spatial information is the foundation of these analyses and is vital to accurate decision making.

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Land IQ has worked in cooperation with the Department of Water Resources (DWR) to complete the statewide crop mapping for 2014, 2016, and then for each hydrologic year beginning in 2018. The 2023 water year is currently in the classification process. The mapping categorizes nearly 15.4 million acres of land use into more than 50 crop and land use types with accuracies exceeding 98%.  Field-by-field classification resulted in over 440,000 individually classified polygons with a minimum field size of 0.5-2.0 acres depending on crop type. 

 

Learn more about who uses land use data and for what reasons here.