Resource management domains: a biophysical unit for assessing and monitoring land quality

Abstract

With the advent of information technology there is a renewed interest to define and identify homogenous food production systems. International donor agencies, such as the World Bank and the US Agency for International Development, are especially interested in public/private partnerships to develop and integrate information including the socio-economic/cultural contexts of farm systems to improve knowledge about food systems, nationally to globally. The International Agricultural Research Centers, non-government organizations and national institutions require a spatial–temporal–hierarchical information system describing farm systems and communities from the ‘nation to the farm’. Agri-business requires methods to evaluate the performance of crop systems in varied environments in countries and/or around the world. As the society is stratified by different information needs, decisions must be made about the units of study and the hierarchy of information integration. The proposed hierarchy, developed on the tenets of hierarchy theory, implies that optimization of biodiversity, ecosystem health and integrity, commodity production, or maintaining soil quality, are each articulated based on the objectives that apply to the planning area. Management goals, therefore, determine the planning area to be defined, the goods and services, and the desired conditions of the ecosystem. Defined biophysical units, such as resource management domains (RMDs), serve as a common denominator for synthesis of information which could be shared by a range of disciplines, such as hydrology, geomorphology, pedology, crop science, economics, sociology, land-use planning, and production technology. In this approach, system dynamics or temporal variations are de-emphasized with the assumption that each RMD has attained an equilibrium or quasi-equilibrium within the planning horizon of the society. This is due to the practical purpose for which land resource assessments are generally made. However, if time periods of 50 or more years are considered, the concept must be refined. The latter approach is required for assessments of forest ecosystems.