LAND USE - Description
Vladimir Stolbovoi

Land use refers to the purposes for which humans exploit land and includes a series of activities carried out on a tract of land to produce commodities or benefits for consumption or sale (IGBP, 1995). Common land uses include agriculture, grazing, forestry, mineral extraction, and recreation and mainly reflects the internal context of land cover. However, nomenclature often does not distinguish the difference between land use and land cover concepts.

Land use encompasses a wide range of natural and socioeconomic aspects and their interrelations. Being a complex phenomenon, land use can be characterized by a number of external and internal characteristics. Land use is an extension of a human activity; the land's perceived purpose is cereals cropping, sheep grazing, forest harvesting, etc. Externally, land cover evidences the purpose of the land-use. For example, cropping will correspond to cropland, grazing to pasture, forest harvesting to forest, etc.

Traditionally, land use information has been collected in the form of various statistics, and recorded as descriptions, tables, or paper maps. Such data storage is organized and linked with administrative units. This association ignores natural characteristics, and that makes it impossible to relate land use practices with any environmental parameters. It is difficult in particular to specify natural conditions by land use and thus understand and analyze the consequences of natural change.

The land use concept has not been widely accepted in Russia. The traditional term "Land Category" (Stolbovoi et al., 1997; Yanvareva, 1989) is closer to the land cover concept, and contains a small portion of information on land use, e.g., forest groups. The CD-ROM database helps to fill this gap.

Figure 1. Application of coverages and databases to distinguish land use of Russia.

Concept

We suggest that land use is closely interrelated with land cover in the way of providing additional information on human activity and specifying this activity in terms of commodity identification, timing, etc. This information, when spatially explicit, may lead to the breakdown of land cover polygons. However, under any conditions would have natural boundaries allowing further linkage of land use data with other natural characteristics.

Method

The map overlap is used to distinguish a land use model for Russia (Figure 1). The basic polygons come from the land cover model. Additional delineation has been derived from the agroregionalization database. This information is used to specify types of land management for cropland as well as general characteristics of crops, rotation systems, application of fertilizers, etc. It also provides data on livestock characteristics. Categories of forest use are taken from the land category database. This source has been also applied for delineation of natural reserves and parks. Essential characteristics of agricultural land and forest reserves could be taken from statistics on State Land and Forest Accounts.

References
IGBP. 1995. Land-Use and Land-Cover Change. Report No. 35, International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, Stockholm, Sweden, pp. 11-12.

Stolbovoi V., G. Fischer, V. Sizov, and B. Rozhkova (Kravets). 1997. The IIASA-LUC Project Georeferenced Database of the Former U.S.S.R., Vol. 5: Land categories. IR-97-087/December, IIASA, Laxenburg, Austria, 15 pp.

Yanvareva, L.F. (ed.), 1989. Land Categories of the U.S.S.R. Map at the scale of 1:4 million. Government Administration for Geodezy and Cartography, Moscow.

Top of Page