An integrated agricultural land quality monitoring information system based on standard plots and WebGIS

Agricultural land quality monitoring is a fundamental and key work for national food security and cultivated land protection that ensures the sustainable development of agriculture. Traditional land surveys usually take long term and huge effort to conduct, while RS technologies are mainly used to monitor the quantity change of land resources. The changing information of the Natural Quality Index (NQI), which directly reflects the agricultural land quality change, is still hard to assess and monitor. This paper takes Hubei Province as study area, where the newly deployed agricultural land standard plots play as key role in establishing an NQI modification model, making the original NQI from different second-class districts comparable with each other to a certain extent. The monitoring results are validated to match the actual distribution of agricultural land quality in Hubei Province, with two years´ data collected from standard plots in 2009 and 2011 showing the agricultural land quality change in 14 counties. Finally, using ASP.NET, ArcGIS Server and database technologies, a Web GIS-based agricultural land quality monitoring information system is designed for the visualization, analysis and management on agricultural land quality monitoring information.