Design And Development Of Agricultural Land Quality Monitoring Information System

Dynamic monitoring of agricultural land quality is a basic task of protecting the quality of arable land, keeping the sustainable development of agricultural and guaranteeing the national food security. Nowadays, across the country the most common way to monitor land resources is to use remote sensing. This method takes the arable land quantity changes into consideration. However, changes of agricultural land quality cannot be monitored, which makes it unable to meet the need of land management, food security and the overall planning of agricultural production. As an important part of agricultural land classification project, the establishment of standard land plots provides qualitative, quantitative and positioned data of agricultural land. Through long-term positioned observation towards the standard land plots, the overall changes of agricultural land quality can be understood, so as to provide the scientific basis for the protection of agricultural land.Based on the result of agricultural land classification of Hubei Province, this study monitors the changes of agricultural land quality within the area dynamically. Also, an agricultural land quality information system—Hubei Agricultural Land Dynamic Monitoring Information System, has been designed and implemented. The main aspects described in this paper are shown as follows:1. The establishment of monitoring points and monitoring indicators. Coordinate grid method based on the result of agricultural land classification, combined with the principle of establishing the monitoring points among the standard agricultural plots, were used to determine the longitude and latitude coordinates of the monitoring points, theoretically. By conducting field investigation, the actual locations of those points were finally set. Monitoring indicators are measures that describe the land quality. According to the need, there are two types of monitoring indicators adopted in this study:one is consistent with the indicators used in agricultural land classification; the other is a set of comparable indicators among different standard land plots which provide possibility of comparing the monitoring results among different stand plots at different regions. 2. Database design. Work flow had been investigated thoroughly early in the system development based on which system data flow was drawn out and system data dictionary was built. Through concept design, logical design and physical design, a database for land quality monitoring system was designed.3. Functional design and implementation. To fulfill the needs of users, system function were divided into six functional modules:database building, data input and management of monitoring indicators, query, index quantization and calculation, as well as result output. This research is to achieve monitoring data management and analysis capabilities in one of the agricultural land quality monitoring information systems.4. Monitoring results and analysis. According to the quality monitoring results of the standard land plots, this study analyzed the current quality status of agricultural land and the changes of the agricultural land quality.