Soil mapping for the Lao People's Democratic Republic

Abstract

The leaflet presents the activities of the second component of the project “Strengthening Agro-climatic Monitoring and Information Systems (SAMIS) to improve adaptation to climate change and food security in Lao PDR”. The Department of Agricultural Land Management (DALaM) under the Ministry of Agriculture (MAF) has, with financial support of FAO Laos and financial support by GEF, produced the national soil map in the country. Soil mapping is the process of delineating natural bodies of soils, classifying and grouping the delineated soils into map units, and capturing soil property information for interpreting and depicting soil spatial distribution on a map and containing a database of soil properties (soil pH, textures, organic matter, depths of horizons, etc.). It is typically the end result of a soil survey inventory. The map will be used by DALaM for calculating suitability and crop productivity today and in the future. The map will feed into the Land Resource Information Management System (LRIMS), a support tool for socio-economic and agricultural policy planning that provides crop modelling for the past and the future.