Proposal for a Global Land Use Classification

The following report is the result of a study carried out at the request of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). The proposed concept for a global land use classification is a sequel to the draft "Describing Agricultural Land Use" of Stomph & Fresco (1991). For many reasons, such as the assessment of the effects of land use on environmental degradation, or the interaction of land use and climatic change, as well as for the planned world agricultural census 2000, there is an urgent need to establish internationally recognized standards for the typology and classification of land use. Methods of defining land in terms of climate, topography and soil have been developed over many years. But until now there is no satisfactory and commonly accepted method of defining and classifying land use for the whole world.

In this report land use is classified, in it's operation context, based on the concept of the operation sequence, proposed in 'describing agricultural land use' (Stomph & Fresco, 1991). This means that land use is only classified in biophysical terms. Land use includes plant biomass production systems as well as animal biomass production systems, but they are classified separately, while both can occur at the same place. The LUIS (Land Use Information System) Working Group has concentrated so far on the classification of plant biomass production. This can be justified by the fact that biological use of the land always implicates plant biomass production, whether there is animal biomass production or not. So plant biomass production forms the basis for the classification of agricultural land use.

The report discusses the major principles of land use classification and contains a proposal for the first five hierarchical levels of a global land use classification.