Identifying Villages for Land Consolidation: A New Agricultural Land Erosion Indicator

Abstract

Among the priorities of the European Union’s (EU) Common Agricultural Policy are the willingness to improve the quality of life in rural areas and effectively utilise their resources. Soil quality is one of the major factors that impact the potential level of agricultural crops. Therefore, it is a key determinant of income from agricultural production in a specific area. The awareness that spatial variations exist in soil quality classes in the study area directly affects the planning of the development of agricultural land and efficient allocation of funds for the spatial redevelopment of rural areas. These data can be used over a very long time in connection with a few changes in land quality. The data on the quality and suitability of soil in the study area were derived from an analysis of map information on land quality and use. The analyses were conducted in 299 villages of the Zamość district, Lublin voivodeship, in the eastern part of Poland. The study area, extending over more than 187,181 hectares (ha), was divided into more than 280,000 plots for administrative purposes. The paper presents a self-designed agricultural land quality indicator to identify precincts featuring the best soils used in agricultural production. The value of the indicator will oscillate from 0 to 1. The value for an object will be close to or equal to 0 when the area comprises only land showing a high degree of erosion, e.g., light soils with a significant slope gradient. The value for an object will be close to or equal to 1 if its area is exclusively or predominantly flat. The highest value of the indicator in the study area was 0.75 and the lowest was 0.26.