GIS in Land use Management

Land use Inventory and Mapping

The first “named” GIS—the Canada Geographic Information System (CGIS), pioneered by Roger Tomlinson in the mid 1960s—was, in fact, part of the Canada Land Inventory, largely undertaken to address the need for improving national land use policies. In addition to the CGIS, other prominent North American examples of GIS-based inventory and mapping from the 1960s include the Minnesota Land Management Information System and New York's Land Use and Natural Resources Inventory System. These efforts were all significant in their pioneering use of digital computers to store, manipulate, update, and display geographically referenced land use data and integrate it with other types of similarly mapped environmental and socioeconomic information.

In the 1970s, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) undertook a nationwide inventory of land cover and land use for the development of a remote sensing-based series of intermediate-scale map products. To address the data management and analysis challenges of such a large undertaking, the Geographic Information Retrieval and Analysis System (GIRAS) was developed. In addition to producing computerized cartographic output, GIRAS also supported storing and querying [Page 1303]hierarchical land use attributes representing multiple levels of mapping detail.

NRCS employees digitizing soils for soil survey information. Digitized layers are used in GIS.

Source: Bob Nichols, USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service.

Another, more recent example of a GIS-based land use data inventory was the digitization of soil surveys by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). Initiated in the early 1990s and designed for use by landowners and local government managers, this effort resulted in highly detailed and richly attributed county SSURGO GIS databases and the more generalized state-level STATSGO products.

Today, GIS-based land use inventory and mapping activities are widespread in state and federal land management agencies as well as local tax assessment departments and planning offices. Combined with land ownership (i.e., cadastral) data, such specialized GIS is sometimes referred to as land resources information systems, or simply land information systems.

GIS-Based Land use Suitability Analysis

Land use suitability analysis involves identifying the most appropriate geographic pattern for future land use activities. Contributing factors may include both the fitness of the land for particular uses as well as the cultural and socioeconomic values and interests of the individuals, groups, and/or organizations involved. GIS-based methods for land use suitability analysis are historically tied to the concept of hand-drawn overlay mapping in landscape architecture, applied first as “sieve mapping” techniques in the late 1800s and early 1900s and advanced with Ian McHarg's ecological inventory process in the 1960s.

...