Land & Water

Land Resources Planning Toolbox

This category of tools gives prominence to biophysical attributes (climate, soil, terrain, water, etc.) and their interactions in the land evaluation process. The output, in most cases, guides the users to suitable options for land use alternatives, based mainly on biophysical attributes. Land suitability and similarity analysis are typical examples. Documents describing principles, approaches and guidelines for land evaluation are included, as well as different tools for classifying soils based on the suitability for a specific use, capability or potential, fertility constraints and management and linkages to yield, productivity, physical and chemical properties. Sophisticated or simplified modelling of crop growth and yield predictions, also fall into this category.

The tools in this category use as inputs information on both biophysical characteristics  and social and economic conditions and generally incorporate principles, approaches and methods of participatory land use planning, with the overall objective of reaching mutually beneficial outcomes for all stakeholders.

The tools in this category give prominence to the characterization of social and economic settings required for land use planning and includes approaches and methods of participatory decision-making. Biophysical conditions may be considered in these tools, but not in depth.

This category includes databases that can facilitate land evaluation and land use planning by providing information that may serve as inputs for the process. These databases provide maps and data on soil and terrain characteristics, land degradation, land cover, land use, climatic data including future projections, crops and yields, food, agriculture, water resources, adaptability/suitability of identified plant species for a given environment, and socio-economic data and statistics on poverty, population, tenure and gender.

This category of tools do not produce results that have direct use for land evaluation and land use planning, but has a supporting role by providing various types of data  that can be used in land evaluation studies and as input data sets for land use planning.

Number of records: 44
The Canadian Soil Information Service (CanSis) is a dissemination platform for Canada’s land resource data. It provides public access to the National Soil Database (NSDB), which contains soil, landscape, and climatic data for all of Canada and serves as the national archive for land resources information collected by federal and...
Type: Data
Scale: National
Thematic areas: Climate, Soils - distribution and properties
User Category: Technical specialist
AQUASTAT is FAO’s global information system on water and agriculture. It collects, analyses and disseminates data and information by country and by region. Its aim is to provide policy-makers, decision-makers and researchers with the most accurate and up-to-date information available on water resources and agricultural water management. AQUASTAT contains country...
Type: Data
Scale: National
Thematic areas: Water - statistics
User Category: Scientific advisor, Policy maker
Agro-MAPS is an interactive web-based information system which contains statistics on primary food crops, aggregated by sub-national administrative districts. It contains basically tabular data, presented on a map background, on crops. Agro-MAPS allows to select by country, eventually sub-national unit (if available for the selected year), crop, crop theme (production,...
Type: Data
Scale: National, Sub-national/Province/District
Thematic areas: Crops - distribution
User Category: Scientific advisor, Policy maker
AFSIS is a data dissemination platform that contains digital soil maps, soil profile databases, remote sensing and field data for Africa. Digital soil maps are spatial databases of soil properties generated through the integration of field and laboratory methods coupled with spatial and non-spatial soil inference systems. Digital soil mapping...
Type: Data,Maps/GIS
Scale: National, Sub-national/Province/District, Watershed/Basin/Landscape
Thematic areas: Soils - distribution and properties
User Category: Technical specialist, Scientific advisor
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