Soil Quality

    Description

    The image displays a classification of soil quality graded from good to poor. Soil quality affects agricultural landuse  capabilites in a similar way to soil type. The soil quality layer was developed to make use of the data on the characteristics of soils in the soil database without adding each as a seperate input. The fundamental physical properties of soil profiles relating to soil quality include; the rooting depth, soil texture, water regime, slope, and existence of impermeable layers. Originally these seperate inputs were weighted and summed using the grid module in ArcInfo to give a soil quality proxy using basic grid commands.
    Source data=Soils geographical database of Europe at scale 1:1M version 3.2

    Comments

    1. Soils can be graded according to the degree of limitations which affect its adaptivity. The grading would not necessarily enable soils to be grouped according to the most profitable use to be made of the land, although they could make interesting comparisons with actual landuse.
    2. The present soil quality grading is based on physical limitations which are fairly permanent and difficult to rectify, chemical and climatic interaction effects are not taken into account.
    3. Soil quality is relative to the type of crop you want to grow, the type of soil, the climate and other factors, for example, grape vines grow well on fairly thin poor sandy soils in hot sunny areas whereas wheat grows better on nutrient rich darker alluvial soils in slightly wetter cooler conditions. It should therefore be advantageous to specify soil quality in relation to each landuse type.
    4. More impressive classifications which take into account interactions with climate and soiltype could develope this layer into a land capability measure.
    5. Land capability classifications is less complex than soil suitability classifications which require some form of landuse optimisation and would require consideration of factors like distance to market, and farm structure.
    6. A fuzzy soil capability classification based on these properties has been designed to grade soils according to the severity of their limitations for crop growth. This will hopefully be implemented in Classification 2.
     
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