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Mississippi Valley of Arkansas Land-use Land-cover

 

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Mississippi Alluvial Valley of Arkansas Land-use/Land-cover

 

Optimal use of soil and water resources is one of the principal challenges facing the agricultural resource community. Numerous water and soil conservation problems are directly related to agriculture including surface water pollution, ground water pollution, topsoil loss, increasing soil salinity levels, and ground water depletion. Specific crops have different impacts on soil and water resources (e.g. cotton generally requires more pesticides than other crops, rice requires more water, etc.). Therefore, it is important to know where specific crops are being grown. Accurate agricultural land-use maps can help soil and water scientists to identify potential problem areas, predict where problems are likely to occur in the future, and to model appropriate solutions.

Nearly all of Arkansas' agricultural crop production occurs in the eastern contiguous counties of the Mississippi Alluvial Valley of Arkansas (MAVA) commonly known as the "Delta." This area also displays many of the problems associated with large-scale agricultural production. In 1996 the Arkansas Natural Resources Commission (ANRC) provided funding to the Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies at the University of Arkansas to develop digital land-use/land-cover maps focusing on agricultural land-use for the 27 Arkansas counties within MAV. Moderate resolution satellite imagery: Landsat Thematic Mapper 5 (TM5) imagery was the chief data source for producing the digital LULC maps. Extensive ground-truth data was also collected to aid in the land-use/cover classification process.Combined with existing spatial data, the information produced from this project will serve as a basis for the formulation of water, soil, and farm management policies and practices.

     

 

In coming years we hope to map land-use and land-cover for the entire state of Arkansas in a manner similar to the MAVA project.  The original project home page, the final project report, as well as a downloadable county statistics and county group map series for the LULC data are available online. For more information about the 1999 LULC study or for further information about remote sensing activities at CAST, please contact Turn on JavaScript!.