FAO helps develop tools to monitor agriculture for food security
Multipurpose land cover data is essential in sustainable development and management of land resources.
The Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock (MAIL) in collaboration with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) have launched the Afghanistan Agriculture Information Portal (AAIP) and Land Cover Atlas of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan as components of the Afghanistan Agriculture Information System.
The two products have been prepared in line with the framework of the FAO Technical Cooperation Project "Harmonization and Finalization of Land Cover Mapping and Approaches' to Agricultural Monitoring" ,which aimed at building sustainable food security in the country by strengthening the human, physical and institutional capacity for analyzing, designing, monitoring and evaluating food security policies and programmes.
The Afghanistan Agriculture Information Portal is a powerful, web-knowledge base and data dissemination platform for compiling agriculture production statistics and crop conditions in the form of dynamic maps, charts and tables.
The Portal has the role of managing and disseminating spatial data, such as satellite images and thematic layers, and non-spatial data, such as crop, climatic and hydrologic variables that national or sub-national institutions generate or collect. It aims to provide its user community with timely and actionable information that is useful for decision making by top management, farmers and other stakeholders interested in crop commodity markets. It will help discovery relevant geospatial data, create maps, and share results on Afghanistan agriculture resources.
The product has been jointly designed by MAIL's GIS unit, FAO Deputy Director-General's office, Geospatial Branch and FAO Afghanistan along with data compiling.
The Afghanistan Land Cover Atlas: Land cover information is undoubtedly an essential prerequisite in the planning and implementation of strategies related to sustainable development and management of land and water resources.
"The availability of such data provides decision makers and resource managers a fundamental information layer for tasks related to natural resource management and agricultural planning" , said John Latham, FAO Senior Environment Officer (Geospatial).
The Afghanistan Land Cover Atlas provides aggregated land cover information as maps or statistics and is the result of a major effort to deliver to managers and decision makers an easy to use and effective source of baseline information on agriculture in the country. The Atlas was developed by a joint effort of MAIL and Office of Deputy Director-General (Natural Resources), FAO.
FAO DDN and is distributed as hard copy publication or in digital format.
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