The
tropical South American lowlands remain one of the last large
land areas at the frontier of agricultural development. In the
1980's CIAT and EMBRAPA
embarked on what then was an ambitious project to systemize
information on climate, soils and landscapes of these tropical
lowlands. The project sought to provide environmental information
for improved land use decisions. Based on CIAT's tropical climate
data base, remote sensing imagery, extensive field work and
secondary data sources, the research classified the 820 million
hectare study area into land systems, or areas of unique combinations
of soil, landscape and climatic characteristics.
The
study was published in 1985 in 5 book volumes of interpretations,
data and geographic information on the tropical South American
lowlands. Over the years, CIAT has received numerous requests
from our partners asking that we share the digital data from
this study. Since the study was developed for a hard copy
book format, digital information from this project has been
difficult to recover. Nor did the developers of the original
data set foresee the many advances in computing that make
this information useful in digital formats. How could we recover
this information and make it useful for our own research and
that of our partners?
In
2003 we started an effort to recuperate the information from
this comprehensive study of land systems in Tropical South
America. We added new and better information from our climate
database, as well as new tools to make dynamic queries of
the data base. We have structured the information in standardized
formats, employing spatial data infrastructure concepts for
data dissemination.
This
web page makes the "Land in Tropical America" study
available to research and development professionals working
in conservation, agroecology and natural resources management
of the lowlands of tropical South America.
Acknowledgements
The study “Land in Tropical America” was originally
financed by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture
(CIAT) and the Brazilian
Agricultural Research Corporation (EMBRAPA).
The database for the study has been maintained by the Land
Use project in CIAT. Additional funds to make the information
available have been provided by the Information and Communication
Technologies and Knowledge Management (ICT-KM) program of
the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research
(CGIAR).
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