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Soil atlas of Asia

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    Book (stand-alone)
    Soil Atlas of Asia 2023
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    The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre and FAO's Global Soil Partnership collaborated with experts from across Asia and other regions to produce the first-ever Soil Atlas of Asia. The aim of the Atlas is to raise awareness about the significance of soil to life in Asia among a wide range of audiences, including the general public, decision makers, politicians, teachers, and scientists from other disciplines. The Atlas comprises a series of annotated maps that demonstrate the diversity of soil characteristics across Asia in an easy-to-understand manner. It also explains how soils are formed, the key factors that shape soil characteristics, and why these vary across the continent. Moreover, the Atlas emphasizes the role of soils in shaping our daily lives and highlights the growing pressures on soils resulting from urban expansion, inappropriate land management, pollution, increased demand for food, and climate change. The Atlas encourages people to understand how their actions can help protect and restore soils while reducing degradation processes.
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    The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan soil atlas
    Volume 1: Maps derived from soil survey of twenty-six districts of nine provinces
    2020
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    The Afghanistan Soil Information System (AfSIS) project, funded by FAO core budget, has completed soil surveys, analyzed soil samples, and mapped soil in nine provinces of Afghanistan. This Afghanistan Soil Atlas is the culmination of this work. This Atlas details soil properties, soil types, key nutrients in soil, and threats to agriculture from degraded soil in nine provinces, as well as selected national soil maps. This Atlas will help policymakers and land users better plan crop plantations, target irrigation designs, and create better climate change mitigation, and natural resource management strategies. The project data and methodology was comprised of field soil profile studies, laboratory soil analyses, and geo-data information. Soil profile site selection considered natural factors influencing soil formation, total land area, and available financial resources. The locations of soil profile sites were preloaded into GPS-enabled mobile or tablet application in order to guide the surveyors to the exact point in the field. During fieldwork, the selected soil profiles including 2-3 soil surface samples were studied according to the FAO Soil Profile description standards. Soil laboratory analysis methods were mostly those, which are favorable for arid and semi-arid region. The new national soil maps created from this data are on 1:200,000 scale, while provincial-level maps are on 1:50,000 scale.
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    Book (stand-alone)
    JORDAN - Land Cover Atlas 2019
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    The Jordanian Land Cover Database and Atlas were developed under the Regional Food Security Analysis Network (RFSAN) project. The main objective of the project is to increase and improve provision of goods and services from agriculture, forestry and fisheries in a sustainable manner as well as to increase the understanding of the bio-physical conditions of land in Jordan. The Land Cover Atlas of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan provides information on the land cover distribution by sub-national administrative boundaries (governorates and districts) provided by the Royal Geographic Centre (RJGC). The Land Cover Database is compliant with the ISO\FAO standard (ISO 19144-2:2012) based on the land cover classification system (LCCS): Land Cover Meta Language (LCML). LCML was implemented to support the standardization and integration of a national land cover classification system across the world. It provides a set of standard diagnostic attributes that are independent of the scale of interpretation. Its use advocates for a more transparent and comparable way of reporting land cover information. The LCML land cover legend was designed with the software LCCSv3. The main data source includes multispectral Sentinel-2 imagery at 10 m of spatial resolution acquired from April to November 2016 and ancillary georeferenced data (land cover and land use map, vegetation cover, soil map) obtained from different institutions. Sentinel-2 imagery were pre-processed and mosaicked to provide a temporal sequence of free-cloud, calibrated images. Then, an Object-Based Image Analysis workflow was applied to segment the images into homogeneous polygons, that were interpreted according to their spectral, texture and shape characteristics supported by vegetation indices and ancillary datasets. Post-processing finally removed incoherent classifications, clipping and dissolving polygons to official boundaries. The final database comprises 1 million polygons classified according to the LCCS Legend distinguished into 34 classes (23 aggregated classes). The statistical analysis of land cover aggregated class distribution is organized into two sections: • National Land Cover Data Base (LCDB). • LCDB by governorates. This work represents a substantial contribution to understanding land cover and land processes in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and provides valuable baseline data to further monitor land changes in the future.

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