This is a Visualizer Website for the GRAIN (Global Registry of Agricultural Irrigation Networks) dataset, supported by Cloudflare R2 data hosting solutions.
GRAIN is an OpenStreetMap (OSM) based dataset of the world's irrigation canals. OSM country-scale data is retrieved from Geofrabrik.de, processed using OSMium CLI Toolkit, and QGIS to filter for waterways and to convert the OSM PBF file to the lightweight cloud optimised GeoParquet format.
A Random Forest classifier, trained on 20,000 samples of rivers and canal geometry, is used to differentiate between man-made canals and natural rivers to correct tagging issues prevalent in OSM data. Canal use type is determined using ESA CCI Land Cover dataset. Validation is done on in-stu canal network data obtained from national and regional scale government datasets, and manually delineated canal vector data.
Dataset is available for download at Zenodo - GRAIN v.1.0
GRAIN is made available as country level files in GeoParquet and ESRI shapefile formats. All GRAIN files are projected to EPSG:4326, based on the WGS-84 datum. Users are recommended to download the GeoParquet files due to the significant smaller file size.
The methodology and validation is described in : Suresh, S., Hossain, F., Mishra, V., Hossain, N., 2025. GRAIN - Global Registry of Agricultural Canal Networks, Earth System Science Data *Submitted for review
Users are encouraged to refer to the GRAIN Documentation website for information on reading and visualizing GRAIN, general methodology, recreating GRAIN data, GRAIN attribute schema etc.