The 2015 Hawaii Statewide Agricultural Land Use Baseline layer was created to provide a snapshot of contemporary commercial agricultural land use activity in Hawaii. It is based upon an assemblage of geospatial datasets, primarily high-resolution WorldView-2 satellite imagery (2011 – 2013) used as a base layer for digitization. Additional datasets used in this work include GIS layers (‘Agriculture and Farming’, ‘Inland Water Resources’, and ‘Cadastral and Land Descriptions’) provided by the state of Hawaii, Office of Planning Statewide GIS Program and other data provided by major land owners and managers. County Real Property Tax and Agricultural Water Use data were also used to identify commercial farm operations. Data for both real property tax assessment and agricultural water use were collected from each county that provided their most recent records, generally from 2014-2015. Not all properties that receive County agricultural tax assessment rates or reduced water cost for agricultural uses were mapped due to the small scale of some of their operations. These data sources were used to verify mapped commercial farms and identify operations that might have been missed using the imagery alone.

Digitized crop locations and boundaries were verified through a combination of on-the-ground site visits, meetings and presentations of draft layers with agricultural stakeholders and landowners, solicitations through a publicly accessible online web mapping portal, and spot-checking using Google Earth™ and other high resolution imagery sources.

The 2015 Hawaii Statewide Agricultural Land Use Baseline layer represents our best efforts to capture the scale and diversity of commercial agricultural activity in Hawaii in 2015 and should be used for informational purposes only.