Assessment and Quantification of Land Productivity Potential in Kilindi District

Abstract

The soil and vegetation degradation is a huge threat to Africa’s land production. The Land's productive capacity can be evaluated directly or indirectly. Direct evaluations are carried out in the field, greenhouse, or laboratory using some experiments under given climatic and management conditions. Indirect evaluations consist of developing and applying varying-complexity models to estimate soil productivity. The main objective of this research was to determine the land productivity index based on various soil and physical parameters using the GIS tool. Specifically, the study focused on quantifying Land productivity for cultivation and grazing at district and division levels. However, the study was conducted in the Kilindi district in the Tanga region. The study area covers about 643155.3ha. After analyzing, and evaluating topographic, and soil properties, a result map was generated for the land productivity index (LPI) through GIS. The square root formula was used to generate the Land productivity index after rating the soil and topography factors for the entire district; the classification of Land productivity was established. According to the results, while most of the study area’s Land productivity (30%-45%) consists of Average and poor classes (II and III) in terms of Crop Cultivation uses, it was found that 6.54% (42040 ha) of the study area has good Land for crop production (II), 26.31 % (169200 ha) of land has average land productivity (III) 40.57 % (260924 ha) has poor land and 26.59%( 643155 ha) and rest of has extremely poor or nil (V).

Keywords

• Land Productivity Index
• Geographical Information System