Map of Irrigated Areas for South East Asia

The Land and Water Development Division of Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main are currently co-operating in the development of a global irrigation mapping facility. The map of irrigation for South East Asia has been developed according to the same methodology as the Global Map of Irrigated Areas, and is fully compatible with this dataset. The irrigation map inventory for South East Asia includes sub-national irrigation statistics for most countries. The target year for the statistics is the year 2000 and refers to areas equipped for irrigation.

To distribute the irrigation statistics per sub-national unit digital spatial data layers and printed maps were used. Irrigation maps were derived from project reports, irrigation sub-sector studies or books related to irrigation and drainage. After on-screen digitizing of the maps the boundaries of the digitized irrigated areas were compared to satellite images in many regions. The shape and size of the digitized areas was adjusted if necessary. Unfortunately for many sub-national units irrigation maps are not available. This occurs in particular in areas with low irrigation density dominated by small scale private schemes. Here additional information was used to find areas were irrigation is likely (e.g. land use maps that show the location of the main irrigated crops). By assigning weights to digitized areas it was possible to distribute irrigation statistics over digitized irrigated areas within the sub-national units. The methodology is described in detail in previous reports of the irrigation mapping project (e.g. A Digital Global Map of Irrigated Areas - An Update for Latin America and Europe, Siebert and Döll, 2001). The map resolution during the generation process was 0.01 degree which was aggregated for use on a continental scale to a final resolution of 5 minutes (0.0833 degrees). The full documentation of this update is described by Stefan Siebert, Sebastian Feick and Jippe Hoogeveen in: "A digital global map of irrigated areas - An update for Asia" (2005). A summary per country is given below.

Choose a country from the list:

The map developed for this project has been incorporated in the Global Map of Irrigation which can be downloaded from GeoNetwork FAO's portal for geographically referenced thematic information.