Bhoomi Geo-Portal – A robust platform of Land Resource Information System for Agricultural Land Use Planning

Abstract

The timely availability of reliable information on land resources enable and rationalize the decision-making processes of planners and managers in a cost effective and time efficient manner. A Geoportal is essentially a master web site, connected to a web server, which contains diversified thematic databases with metadata information about geographic data and services. The objective of the study is to collect, collate and standardize the georeferenced land and allied resources databases of NBSS&LUP in Geographic Information System (GIS) to develop land resource information system and NBSS&LUP BHOOMI Geoportal to facilitates the services like visualize, access, query and dissimilate the land resource information and develop various applications. The Land Resource Information System and NBSS&LUP BHOOMI Geoportal designed and developed as Web based platform deployed on server architecture to deploy various land and allied thematic services as Web Map Services (WMS). The web map services have been developed using ArcGIS server architecture by displaying various thematic layers in the server and then shared as a map packages. In Land Resource Information System and NBSS&LUP BHOOMI Geoportal, the available soil resource database on 1:1m and 1:250,000 scales, Agro-ecological regions, Agro-ecological sub-regions, soil loss, degraded and wastelands data were deployed. The point layer data on rainfall, benchmark soils, soil series for selected states and districts, soil loss, soil fertility, Digital Elevation Models developed from SRTM (90m) and ASTER (30m) of India have also been deployed. The soil loss polygon and soil-site databases with attributes have also been included in the Geoportal. The standardized soil resource database contains information about the soil site characteristics, physical and chemical properties. The user interface of NBSS BHOOMI Geo-portal acts as a gateway to visualize various land and allied thematic and attribute layers. Users are able to access functionalities as metadata discovery, maps navigation with pan/zoom, advanced printing and geographic queries. The developed NBSS BHOOMI Geoportal helps to acquire, process, store, distribute and improve the utilization and dissemination of geo-spatial data. This new initiative enable us to minimize redundancies, duplication of efforts, enforcing consistency, standards, and sharable protocols to build cross-domain knowledge based applications in agricultural land use planning in the country.