Artificial drainage has major ecosystem impacts through the development of extensive ditch networks that reduce storage and induce large-scale vegetation changes. This has been a widespread practice of water table management for agriculture in Eastern North Carolina. However, these features are challenging to identify, and (because of their structure) have been determined by non-natural factors. A dataset of open ditches was processed by calculating terrain openness (also called positive openness): a value based on a line-of-sight approach to measure the surrounding eight zenith angles as viewed above the landscape surface. The result from calculating openness with high resolution digital elevation models (DEMs or Lidar) was then refined by masking natural water ways (stream valleys) and channels that are associated with transportation and urban areas. The resulting raster dataset presented here represents areas without ditches (cell value of 0), a ditch not along a transportation corridor (1), the transportation corridor (100), and ditches along a transportation corridor (101).