NSW Summer Irrigated Crop Areas Derived from Satellite Imagery, 1987-Present

NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water provides a timeseries of earth observation-derived irrigated crop area polygons for New South Wales. The dataset is derived from Landsat and Sentinel satellite sensors and covers summer seasons from 1987 to the present day, updated on an ongoing basis for selected catchments.

Use Cases

• Monitor changes in irrigated agricultural land use over time based on the multi-decade satellite timeseries.
• Model water demand and usage in agricultural catchments based on the spatial extent of irrigated crops.
• Validate or calibrate hydrological models using the geospatial polygons of irrigated areas.
• Assess the impact of climate or policy changes on summer irrigation practices based on the location and extent data.

Strengths

• Long-term temporal coverage spanning from 1987 to the present day.
• Data is updated on an ongoing basis, suggesting current relevance.
• Derived from multiple established satellite sources (Landsat and Sentinel).
• Spatial data is provided in multiple standard geospatial formats (WFS, ESRI REST, WMS).

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data may reflect geographic bias inherent to data_gov_au, focusing only on selected NSW catchments.

Provenance

Source

NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water

Collection Method

Derived from publicly available Earth Observation collections of Landsat and Sentinel satellite sensors.

Time Range

1987 to present day

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-13 03:54:22.340258; freshness should be verified.

Geography

New South Wales, Australia (selected catchments)