Developments in land information systems: examples demonstrating land resource management capabilities and options

Land Information Systems (LIS) provide a foundation for supporting decision-making across a broad spectrum of natural resource applications: agronomic, environmental, engineering and public good. Typically, LIS constitute a computerized database repository holding geospatial components, ‘mapping unit’ geometry and related georeferenced materials such as satellite imagery, meteorological observations and predictions and scanned legacy mapping. Coupled with the geospatial data are associated property, semantic and metadata, representing a range of thematic properties and characteristics of the land and environment. This paper provides examples of recent developments of national and regional LIS, presenting applications for land resource capabilities and management. These focus on the ‘Land Information System’ (LandIS) for England and Wales, and the ‘World Soil Survey Archive and Catalogue’ (WOSSAC) and consider Agricultural Land Classification in Wales, an Irish land and soil information system, and a scheme to optimize land suitability for application of palm oil biofertilizers in Malaysia. Land Information Systems support purposeful environmental interpretations, drawing on soil and related thematic data, offering insight into land properties, capabilities and characteristics. The examples highlight the practical transferability and extensibility of technical and methodological approaches across geographical contexts. This assessment identifies the value of legacy-based natural resource inventories that can be interoperated with other contemporary sources of information, such as satellite imagery.