Statewide Crop Mapping
Problem:
Land use data is critically important to the work of the Department of Water Resources (DWR) and other California public agencies. Understanding the impacts of land use, crop location, acreage, and management practices on environmental attributes and resource management is an integral step in the ability of Groundwater Sustainability Agencies (GSAs) to execute Groundwater Sustainability Plans (GSPs) and implement projects to attain sustainability. Yet, GSAs had no comprehensive spatial land use data set available in California.
Since 2011, Land IQ has conducted large scale mapping of crops in California. In 2016, Land IQ was contracted in by DWR to comprehensively and accurately map cropped land use beginning with the 2014 crop year, covering over 9.4 million acres of irrigated agriculture on a field scale and additional areas of urban extent.
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The primary objective was to provide a spatial land use database with accuracies exceeding 95% using Land IQ's remote sensing, statistical, and temporal analysis methods. Land IQ conducted statewide land use mapping for 2014, 2016, and then annually from 2018 on, classifying over 15 million acres of land into agriculture and urban areas on a water year (WY) basis. This effort was expanded to include multicropping starting in 2018.
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Land IQ integrates crop production knowledge with detailed ground truth information and multiple satellite and aerial image resources to conduct remote sensing land use analysis at the field scale. Land IQ provides the following:
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Individual field boundaries of homogeneous crop types representing true cropped area, rather than legal parcel boundaries.
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Fields are classified at multiple levels, a crop category legend (DWR) and a more specific crop type legend (Land IQ) accounting for up to 56 specific crop types.
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To determine frequency and seasonality of multiple-cropped fields, peak growth dates and percentage of the field cropped are determined for annual crops to better define planting, peak vigor and crop termination dates for annual crops.
Solution:
The Land IQ mapping process involves ground truth data collection within the water year, capturing training and validation data about crops in the ground. When the water year is complete, the mapping process begins and takes approximately 8 months to complete. Land IQ performs advanced mapping for custom clients contracts or clients who are contracted to receive field-level consumptive use or evapotranspiration estimates.
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Land IQ’s land use mapping was the first statewide account of land use developed for DWR and beginning in 2018, the first continuous land use set spanning over five years.Â
Statewide Crop Mapping
Differentiators
Land IQ’s crop mapping does not depend on grower survey methods that are often incomplete or entirely miss new growers.
Land IQ’s crop mapping combines advanced spatial analytics with agronomic experience to provide highly accurate results.
Land IQ’s methodology allows for large-scale crop and land use identification to be performed at time increments as desired and make comprehensive statewide land use information available.
