SOIL INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR LAND SUITABILITY EVALUATION AND LAND USE PLANNING AT COMMUNE LEVEL IN CENTRAL VIETNAM A case study of two communes in Thua Thien Hue province
Abstract
Vietnam is an agricultural country which is divided into provinces, districts and communes, administratively. Commune is a suitable area unit where all agricultural projects, land use planning, and policies are directly deployed. Thus, a synchronous, accurate, unified and easy-used LIS for serving the land suitability analysis of crop, land use planning and land administration is very necessary and useful. However, there are very few of 10,876 communes in Vietnam having this LIS and most of the researches on this issue in Vietnam focus mainly at macroscopic and regional scale.Aim of study was to create and maintain a database and thematic information of soils, land use, social-economy for Land Information System (LIS) using GIS method at commune level. This LIS being a tool that could support for the local authorities, land use planners, land users and extension service providers having enough available information to conduct projects and micro level development activities and also not necessary from the start of investigation of elementary data that is very costly, asynchronous and consumes a lot of time. Studies were conducted in two communes Thuy Bang and Huong Binh, located at hilly area of central Vietnam. Background maps source as soils, current land use, and topography of two communes and social-economic data were gathered and inherited from local Statistic Offices, projects of different Departments of Thua Thien Hue province. In addition, questionnaire interviews were implemented in 13 and 7 villages of Thuy Bang and Huong Binh, respectively. Field visits, field plot inventories on the many farms and map editing work were also conducted. GIS software was used for database storage on the computer.
Key-words: Soil information; commune unit; land evaluation, GIS.
References
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