THE USE OF GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION-SYSTEMS (GIS) IN LAND RESOURCES APPRAISAL

Nations, village communities and individual land users need to make choices about land use in order to support development without risk of land degradation. Computerized land information systems (LIS) based on geographic information systems (GIS) have emerged as powerful tools for generating maps and reports to inform such decisions, Recently, FAO has been developing GIS/LIS systems in linkage with its agroecological zoning (AEZ) and other models, and using them to tackle issues of land, food and people at global, national and subnational levels. They have been successfully developed for land resource management at different scales, but practical difficulties have been encountered in making them accessible to the casual user in most developing countries, due to scarcity of data and poor training support.