Deriving homogeneous land unit of Karnal district through geographic information systems

Soil information is the important input in determining crop suitability of different soils. In order to have maximum yield and profit, integrated information of soil characteristics/qualities, climate and data on level of crop management are required. In this study, site-specific socio-economically viable knowledge-driven management system was adopted to increase farm profits by using the modern tools viz. Geographic Information System (GIS) and Global Positioning System (GPS). Soil physico-chemical characteristics viz. texture, pH, electrical conductivity (EC), organic carbon (OC) content were used to integrate with rainfall data for better agriculture management options. For the Karnal district, village wise point data of soil texture, pH, EC and OC were interpolated for making the surface for each parameter by using GIS. Overlay of all the thematic layers were resulted 13 homogeneous soil units. This soil unit map was overlaped with generated rainfall map (4 zones), resulted 27 homogeneous land units.