A Comparison of Approaches to Regional Land-Use Capability Analysis for Agricultural Land-Planning

Land

ZacharyP. Stewart¹  P.V. Vara Prasad¹  Mamadou Ouattara²  Maman Garba²  IdrissaA. Oumarou²  EkweL. Dossa³  Upendra Singh⁴  JeffreyE. Herrick⁵  TaraA. Ippolito⁶  JasonC. Neff⁶ 

[1] Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Collaborative Research on Sustainable Intensification, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS 66506, USA;Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique du Niger (INRAN), Niamey BP 429, Niger;International Fertilizer Development Center, Cotonou 04 BP 673, Benin;International Fertilizer Development Center, Muscle Shoals, AL 35661, USA;Jornada Experimental Range, United States Department of Agriculture—Agricultural Research Service, Las Cruces, NM 88003, USA;The Sustainability Innovation Laboratory at Colorado, University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO 80309, USA;

关键词: land capability classification;    drought;    land degradation;    vulnerability;    agriculture;   

DOI  :  10.3390/land10050458

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Smallholder agriculture is a major source of income and food for developing nations. With more frequent drought and increasing scarcity of arable land, more accurate land-use planning tools are needed to allocate land resources to support regional agricultural activity. To address this need, we created Land Capability Classification (LCC) system maps using data from two digital soil maps, which were compared with measurements from 1305 field sites in the Dosso region of Niger. Based on these, we developed 250 m gridded maps of LCC values across the region. Across the region, land is severely limited for agricultural use because of low available water-holding capacity (AWC) that limits dry season agricultural potential, especially without irrigation, and requires more frequent irrigation where supplemental water is available. If the AWC limitation is removed in the LCC algorithm (i.e., simulating the use of sufficient irrigation or a much higher and more evenly distributed rainfall), the dominant limitations become less severe and more spatially varied. Finally, we used additional soil fertility data from the field samples to illustrate the value of collecting contemporary data for dynamic soil properties that are critical for crop production, including soil organic carbon, phosphorus and nitrogen.

【 授权许可】

Unknown