Agricultural Land Use Dynamics - A Case Study of Kumkurgan District, Uzbekistan

Abstract

In recent years, many investigators started using global land cover data sets for a variety of purposes. ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World offers access to a collection of geographic information from around the globe to perform different analyses including monitoring the status of agricultural lands. Timely and reliable Land Use and Cover Change information can be used for a better understanding of the dynamics of agricultural land use. Therefore, this research aims at analysing agricultural land loss or expansion in Kumkurgan district, Uzbekistan, using openly available global land cover data sets. Using high-resolution, open, accurate, comparable, and timely global land use/land cover data plays a critically important role in enabling dynamic change analysis. Such analysis has a remarkable impact, particularly for agricultural lands with the aim of their more effective use and addressing the ongoing demand for other land use types. In addition, these maps support agricultural land allocation decisions and further land use planning for sustainable development as well. We performed agricultural areas change analysis leveraging data from the Living Atlas infrastructure between 2017 and 2022, using ArcGIS Pro. To compare the results achieved from globally available online data sets, national summary statistics data on agriculture provided by the Chamber of State Cadastres was used. Our findings indicate that due to hilly terrain, the availability of valuable cropland is limited in comparison to other agricultural land use types like rangeland within the entire study area. Due to state land ownership and centralised planning, mostly two major cash crops - cotton and wheat - are cultivated in these areas. This research is intended as a baseline for ultimately establishing a methodology for the optimisation of agricultural land allocation to specific crops.