Environmental Management: Principles and practice

Land use planning, land classification, land appraisal, land capability assessment,
land suitability assessment, land evaluation and terrain evaluation
Land use planning is a process which may operate at local, regional or national
scale; land capability assessment, land appraisal, land evaluation, land suitability
assessment and terrain evaluation feed into that process. A land use survey indicates
the situation at the time of study, and is not the same as a capability classification,
which looks to the future. There are various approaches and methods for land use
classification, e.g. the Ecological Series Classification or the Holdridge Life Zones
System. Often the land use planning approach adopted depends on a country’s politics.
It is widely felt that land use planning is a valuable ingredient of EIA and in the

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quest for sustainable development and that EIA can feed into land use planning. In
practice the two are often poorly integrated.
Land capability assessment, land evaluation and land appraisal generally follow
a proactive approach similar to that of EIA (scoping, data collection, evaluation,
presentation of decision) in the production of a land capability classification or land
evaluation (Beek, 1978; Patricos, 1986). Some approaches consider a range of factors,
which might include the concept of carrying capacity, others just soil characteristics
and slope. The end product is a description of landscape units in terms of inherent
capacity to produce a combination of plants, animals, etc.; it is also likely to reflect
government development goals, market opportunities, labour availability and public
demands (e.g. terraced agriculture may be possible but labour is not available).
Simple inventories of land use and, to a limited extent, capability were made
in medieval times—notably the Domesday Book. Modern land capability
classification was developed by the US Soil Conservation Service in the 1930s in
response to problems like the US Dust Bowl. Linked to consideration of conservation
and development, land capability classification can lead to a land suitability assessment
(a rating of landscape units showing what development they might best support).
Land suitability assessment may depend on overlay maps of various landscape or
development attributes, or direct field observation of clues (something local people
may traditionally do) —e.g. seek distinctive plants indicative of good soil.
Geographical information systems (GIS) and remote sensing are increasingly applied
to land capability assessment.