GIS Maps Aid Irrigation Districts
By Danielle Supercinski, Guy Fipps and Eric Leigh, September 2005
These irrigation district maps are on display for a meeting at the Brownsville Irrigation District office.
GIS-based maps of 30 Rio Grande Basin irrigation districts in Texas completed during spring 2005, will serve as an indispensable tool for planning future projects and managing districts’ day-to-day operations.
Features that are displayed on these maps include: district boundaries, canals that are colored by lined or unlined, pipelines, siphons, reservoirs, resacas, river pumping stations, district to district diversion points, roads, and aerial photographs. Some maps also include the Rio Grande River and Arroyo Colorado systems.
Irrigation districts also use these maps to determine exact “water accounts” of field boundaries and areas, and for the formal process of excluding land from the district as it urbanizes.
More districts have been using GIS and maps for day-to-day management decisions, maintenance scheduling, on-farm water delivery strategies and optimization, and for rehabilitation planning.
The general public may even have an interest in these maps to determine exact locations of district facilities and to see how these may impact their property. Many organizations, including environmental and wildlife interests, use these maps as part of their conservation and public education programs.
These maps can be ordered online at http://idea.tamu.edu/gismaps.php. Three sets of additional maps have been published and can be found on the IDEA Web site as well.
Current project staff includes Guy Fipps, Eric Leigh, David Flahive and Askar Karimov. Funding for the mapping has been provided through the Efficient Irrigation for Water Conservation in the Rio Grande Basin project for the past 5 years.
Look for more irrigation district map information in the upcoming November issue of the Rio Grande Basin Initiative Outcomes newsletter.
