Large-scale irrigation area mapping: Status and challenges
2026
Wanxue Zhu | Elif Dönmez | Hugo Storm | Thomas Heckelei | Stefan Siebert
Robust mapping of large-scale irrigation area is critical for sustainable water management and climate-resilient agriculture. However, a comprehensive synthesis of the conceptual foundations, inherent limitations, comparative strengths, and developmental trends of existing methodologies and datasets remains lacking, hindering methodological advancement and context-appropriate dataset selection. To bridge this gap, we (i) take stock of global and regional irrigation area datasets, elucidating their methodological frameworks, characteristics, interrelations, and current spatial–temporal–thematic gaps; (ii) benchmark ten datasets across Europe against EUROSTAT 2020 gridded-type statistics, showing the importance of survey-based statistics for ensuring mapping accuracy, particularly in humid regions where remote sensing exhibits inherent limitations; (iii) review prevailing mapping frameworks, identifying scarce, inconsistent, and restricted-access ground-truth and statistics data as the primary bottleneck, while proposing response strategies for future research. By integrating these dimensions, our analysis delineates the state of global irrigation mapping and charts a pathway toward precision monitoring, ultimately empowering robust water resource modeling and safeguarding the resilience of agricultural ecosystems in an era of escalating climatic variability.
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