GMIE: a global maximum irrigation extent and central pivot irrigation system dataset derived via irrigation performance during drought stress and deep learning methods

Abstract. Irrigation accounts for the major form of human water consumption and plays a pivotal role in enhancing crop yields and mitigating the effects of drought. Accurate mapping of irrigation distribution is essential for effective water resource management and the assessment of food security. However, the resolution of the global irrigated cropland map is coarse, typically approximately 10 km, and it lacks regular updates. In our study, we present a robust methodology that leverages irrigation performance during drought stress as an indicator of crop productivity and water consumption to identify global irrigated cropland. Within each irrigation mapping zone (IMZ), we identified the dry months of the growing season from 2017 to 2019 or the driest months from 2010 to 2019. To delineate irrigated cropland, we utilized the collected samples to calculate normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) thresholds for the dry months of 2017 to 2019 and the NDVI deviation from the 10-year average for the driest month. By integrating the most accurate results from these two methods, we generated the Global Maximum Irrigation Extent dataset at 100 m resolution (GMIE-100), achieving an overall accuracy of 83.6 % ± 0.6 %. The GMIE-100 reveals that the maximum extent of irrigated cropland encompasses 403.17 ± 9.82 Mha, accounting for 23.4 % ± 0.6 % of the global cropland. Concentrated in fertile plains and regions adjacent to major rivers, the largest irrigated cropland areas are found in India, China, the United States, and Pakistan, which rank first to fourth, respectively. Importantly, the spatial resolution of GMIE-100 surpasses that of the dominant irrigation map, offering more detailed information essential to support estimates of agricultural water use and regional food security assessments. Furthermore, with the help of the deep learning (DL) method, the global central pivot irrigation system (CPIS) was identified using Pivot-Net, a novel convolutional neural network built on the U-net architecture. We found that there is 11.5 ± 0.01 Mha of CPIS, accounting for approximately 2.90 % ± 0.03 % of the total irrigated cropland. In Namibia, the United States, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Canada, and Zambia, the CPIS proportion was greater than 10 %. To our knowledge, this is the inaugural study to undertake a global identification of specific irrigation methods, with a focus on the CPIS. The GMIE-100 dataset containing both the irrigated extent and CPIS distribution is publicly available on Harvard Dataverse at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/HKBAQQ (Tian et al., 2023a).