Land resource inventorying (LRI) on 1:10K – National soil priority of India

Abstract

Degrading land resources, deteriorating ecosystem services, increasing aridity, shrinking water resources, and growing demands of quality food are the main concerns of Indian agriculture. Growing crops out of the suitability domain with a uniform package of practices is one of the bottlenecks. However, the country's targets are an agricultural growth rate of 4% annually and doubling the farmer's income. These call for site-specific information and situation-specific recommendations. Land resource inventory (LRI) developed such databases by including factors and soil formation processes in the past and the present on a scale of 1:10K. Landscape ecological unit (LEU), a combination of landforms, slopes, and land use, was used as a base for this purpose. The landforms were the assemblage of pedogenic processes in the past. Land uses and the slope, respectively, propelled and distributed energy for the present soil-forming process (Lin et al., 2008). High-resolution remote sensing data and digital elevation model (DEM) were used in LEU delineation. Besides phases of soil series, LRI allocated the potential zones for rainfed and irrigated agriculture, site-specific nutrient management, horticulture, soil conservation, carbon sequestration, and animal rearing. It also delimited the sensitive regions for climate change, erosion, and landslides. The decision support system attached to the database demarcated the sustainable area for land uses and the best management practices (BMP). The paper reports the methodology, discusses the results and implications by citing an example of Goa state, known as the epicentre of climate change.