Land Resources Information in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya
The Libyan Arab Jamahiriya is situated in North Africa between 20 and 37º north and between 10 and 25º east. It is about 1.75 million square kilometers in extent. More than 95 percent of the country is desert. Cultivable areas cover an estimated 3.8 million hectares, slightly over two percent of the total area. The majority of the cultivated land and rangelands is located in the northern zone. At present, the areas which are under irrigation are estimated at 400 thousand hectares. These areas include large projects, settlements and smallholder farms. The total population is about 4.8 million (1995) of which 14 percent is rural. Agriculture contributes less than five percent to GDP, although it provides employment for approximately 13 percent of the active population.
The climatic conditions are influenced by the Mediterranean sea to the North and the Sahara desert to the South, resulting in an abrupt transition from one kind of weather to another. In The Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, the volume of water potentially available for use is estimated at 3820 million m³ of which 170 million m³ is surface water, 650 million m³ is annual recharge to groundwater aquifers and 3 000 million m³ is an acceptable depletion rate of the nonrenewable aquifer.
Extensive soil studies (about 250) have been carried out in The Libyan Arab Jamahiriya over the last four decades. Emphasis was given mainly on the northern part of The Libyan Arab Jamahiriya and to small scattered areas in the southern desert. The present soil survey reports and maps differ in their contents, types of maps, scale of mapping, classification systems used, methods of soil analysis, and the criteria on which the interpretation of data is based. The major soil classification systems used in these reports are USA Soil Taxonomy, modern soil classification of Russia, French soil classification, and FAO/UNESCO system. The major available interpretive soil and land maps are land capability, soil salinity, soil erosion, soil depth, and soil and land suitability.
Khaled Ben-Mahmoud, |
None of these maps are in digital format yet. Despite pressing needs for natural resources management in The Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, the necessary LRIMS is still lacking. This has recently (September 2000) promoted urgent calls for establishment of a Libyan land resources database and Information Management System through project LIB/00/004, implemented by FAO. This project will insert all natural resources data in a geographically referenced computerized data base.
A national regional Soils and Terrain Digital Database (SOTER) has not yet been established in The Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, it will be one of the outputs of the project. However, in 1999 a pilot project established a SOTER map for an area of 433 000 ha extending from Tripoli to Garian. A scale of 1:250 000 was tried and resulted in identifying 21 SOTER units. Maps of types and degrees of erosion on the same area were also produced by using SWEAP software.
The major soil problems of Libyan agriculture are erosion and salinity. New tasks that have become priorities in the last few years are counter-acting land resources degradation and improving poor land management practices. Therefore, plans must call for LRIMS to be used in guiding and supporting wise land use, soil and water conservation and revising productivity.
