Thünen Agricultural-GIS

Background and Objective

Data describing land use, natural site characteristics and environmental legal territorial settings are collected and made available by various institutions in the Länder. Within the framework of the Thünen Agricultural GIS, data describing land use on agricultural land is compiled. This includes, for example, data on soil properties, protected areas under nature conservation law, water and flood plains or biodiversity.

GIS-based analyses of agricultural land use for Germany are only possible if these data are compiled in advance of an area-based evaluation by various federal and state institutions and integrated into a GIS system. The aim of the project is to integrate various agricultural, natural and environmental data from land use, soil and climate data to farm data into a uniform GIS. This allows the analysis of land use to be carried out on the basis of a uniform and continuously maintained data infrastructure, even over different periods of time.

Approach

The following steps are necessary so that a consistent data set can be created in the Thünen agricultural GIS:

• Request and obtain approval for data access to specialised data from various authorities and institutions at federal and state level.
• Intersection of the technical data with a 10*10 metre point grid developed at the Thünen Institute for Rural Areas (over 3.5 billion data points) as a method for database management and intersection of very large GIS data sets
• Development of a meta-information system on the properties of the data sets and rights of use
• Compliance with data protection requirements through processor- and project-specific assignment of rights
• Intersection and linking of different  data sources

Data and Methods

To create and use the agricultural GIS, various agricultural georeferenced technical data are compiled and processed at the Thünen Institute. These data are then documented and stored in the Agricultural-GIS database. The technical data are intersected with other technical data and analyzed in their spatial characteristics and their change tendencies over different time series.

Preliminary Results

The agricultural GIS serves both to fulfill permanent tasks in the field of policy advice or emissions reporting and to process various third-party funded projects dealing with the evaluation of agricultural land use more efficiently. An example of this is the superior project Greening or the Thünen agricultural atlas.