Australian Irrigation Areas (Raster), Version 1A, National Land and Water Resources Audit

This data set shows designated and actual irrigation areas in Australia compiled by the National Land Use Mapping Project of the National Land and Water Resources Audit to assist in the identification of irrigation areas in Australia. Additional data custodians include Agriculture WA, Queensland Department of Natural Resources and Mines, Murray-Darling Basin Commission, New South Wales Department of Land and Water Conservation and Tasmanian Department of Primary Industries, Water and Environment.aDesignated irrigation areasa indicate areas with administratively defined boundaries which have associated rights and obligations pertaining to use of water for irrigation. The precise meaning of the term adesignated irrigation areaa varies from region to region. aActual irrigation areasa indicate areas with observationally defined boundaries within which irrigation is practised. The boundaries have been supplied by various agencies and cover the more important irrigation areas in Australia. Users of this data set should be aware that there are irrigated areas outside the designated and actual areas shown and that there are non-irrigated areas inside them. This is particularly true of Tasmania and the Murray-Darling Basin.The data set is available in both vector and raster formats. The raster data set can be used as a companion to the 1996/97 Land Use of Australia data set which is also in raster format. Both data sets have the same coordinate system, boundary coordinates and cell size so that they can easily be overlaid. Users may find, however, that some cells are classified as irrigated by the Australian Irrigation Areas data set and as non-agricultural land by the 1996/97 Land Use of Australia data set.The Version 1a data set may be of use to researchers and policy makers in need of national, regional or local scale irrigation data, though the scale of the source material is highly variable and completedness of coverage is poor in some regions.

See further metadata for more detail.