For our modeling friends, Christmas has come early this year with the provisional release of the 2023 land use data set. The data for viewing and download on the Department of Water Resource’s website. The release of these important data sets means there are six (water) years of continuous statewide land use mapping and eight datasets in total available for public use.
Changes in the WY 2023 mapping include:
Mixed Pasture & Miscellaneous Grasses Refinements The Land IQ Subclasses of Mixed Pasture and Miscellaneous Grasses were further refined for DWR’s Northern Regional Office. Historically, Miscellaneous Grasses indicated fields that were cut for hay at least once during summer months, even if followed by grazing, and Mixed Pasture was used for fields exclusively used for grazing. Starting in 2023, based on direction by DWR, Miscellaneous Grasses indicates fields exclusively cut for hay and Mixed Pasture is used for fields with grazing occurring, even if grazing occurs after a hay cutting during the summer months.
Additionally, some helpful attributes included in this dataset:
Idle/Unclassified Fallow Trends Because more than five consecutive years of mapping have been completed, fallow acreage has been further classified into idle classes depending on the fallow cropping trends over time and include the categories of Idle-Long Term, Idle-Short Term, and Unclassified Fallow.
Age
Permanent crops, other than grapes, have an attribute of Yr_Planted, which indicates the year the orchard/grove was planted.
Multi-Cropping/Percent Cover/Peak Dates In areas where more than one crop is planted in a field during the water year, up to four crops are identified. To determine frequency and seasonality of multiple-cropped fields, peak growth dates and percentage of the field cropped are provided for annual crops.
Land Use Mapping History
The Land IQ land use mapping began with the 2014 main season crop. 2016 mapping was conducted in the same way, and then moved to a continuous, water year basis (October 1 – September 30) in 2018. The mapping currently categorizes nearly 15.7 million acres of land use into more than 56 crop and land use types, with accuracies exceeding 98%. Field by field classification results in nearly 446,000 individually classified polygons with a minimum field size of 0.5-2.0 acres depending on crop type. Accuracy assessments for each mapping event are available for review.
Land Use Mapping Uses
Amongst its many uses, this statewide data resource has been developed to support the needs of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA). The intent of this work is for all Groundwater Sustainability Agencies (GSAs) to use this data as a consistent foundational land use layer in developing and implementing their groundwater sustainability plans (GSPs), groundwater modeling efforts, compliance monitoring, annual reporting, etc. The list of uses and users can be viewed here.
Land IQ is currently in the process of mapping the 2024 water year and collecting ground truth data for the 2025 water year. We take pride in being able to develop this important data in a timely manner so that end users have the ability to use it in their decision-making processes.
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