Integrated Remote Sensing, GIS, and GPS Applications in Agricultural Land Use Planning

Abstract

Land use planning is the systematic assessment of land potential, alternatives for land use, and economic and social conditions in order to select and adopt the best land use options to achieve accelerated growth through judicious management of land and water resources. Inappropriate land management and land use practices and climatic aberrations like droughts and floods lead to degradation of soil, water, and vegetative cover, which affects the quality of land resources, land use patterns, and ecosystem functions. There is a felt need to develop detailed database on extent and nature of land resources, their potentials, and limitations for land resource-based scientific sustainable agricultural land use planning. Advance geospatial tools like remote sensing, geographic information system (GIS), and global positioning system (GPS) could be effectively used in land resource mapping and agricultural land use planning. The integration of spatial data and their combined analysis could be performed through GIS and simple database query systems to complex analysis and decision support systems for effective land resource management. The scope and potential applications of geospatial technologies in inventory, mapping and management of land resources, agricultural resources surveys, agroecological zonation, land degradation mapping and assessment, soil moisture estimation, soil fertility mapping and assessment, crop acreage estimation, crop yield forecasting, water resources planning and management, development of land resource information system, development of decision support systems, land evaluation, crop suitability evaluation, precision agriculture, characterization of land management units, development of land use options, and future perspectives for sustainable land use planning were briefly discussed in the chapter.