The ‘Agro-ecological Land Resources Assessment for Agricultural Development Planning’, is a study concerned with the development and implementation of a national level methodology for the determination of land use potentials of land resources of individual districts for policy formulation and development planning. This Kenya case study has been carried out by FAO and IIASA in collaboration with the Government of Kenya (FAO 1984).
The work is described in a main report entitled: Resources Data Base and Land Productivity. This report is supported by technical annexes which deal with details.
This technical annex deals with the land resources inventory, its make up, contents and computerization. The land resources inventory is made up of the climatic resources inventory and the soil resources inventory. In Section 3, the climatic data bank that has been assembled for the assessment is described. Section 4 presents a description of the analysis of growing period and its year-to-year variability. Sections 5 to 7 deal with the climatic resources inventory which is designed to provide a quantification of climatic parameters that relate to crop, pasture and fuelwood adaptability characteristics and productivity dealt with in Technical Annexes 2,3,4,5 and 6. In Section 8 the soil resources data base, containing data on soil, landform and geology/parent material is described. This information is derived from the 1:1 million scale Exploratory Soil Map of Kenya and the soil mapping unit composition table. In Section 9 the make-up of the mapped and computerized land resources is presented.
