Project

Updating Maps of Protected Cropland

The Soil Protection Agency of the Canton of Zurich updates its cropland maps with an ArcGIS extension designed and implemented by EBP. This renders the regular update of the cantonal cropland maps more efficient.

The Soil Protection Agency of the Canton of Zurich is responsible for updating the canton’s maps of crop rotation areas or cropland. Cropland accounts for the country’s best agricultural soils.

Any loss of cropland as a result of development or zoning ordinances must be compensated for at other locations via rezoning or the addition of new protected areas. Cropland development can therefore take on considerable complexity for anyone wishing to maintain a territorial overview.

In light of this problem, the Soil Protection Agency commissioned EBP to develop an application that would help users to track cropland development and to essentially update cropland maps at the press of a button.

Working together with the Soil Protection Agency, EBP developed an updating concept and then applied this concept by way of an extension of ArcGIS for Desktop (F3N).
F3N is a powerful tool that supports users throughout the update process, for instance, by identifying changes in the relevant data pools and deriving the latest territorial developments. This allowed us to significantly increase the efficiency of the update process compared to conventional approaches, while at the same time achieving greater transparency and flexibility.

The new tool will enable the Canton of Zurich to keep its cropland maps up to date without extra demands on human resources. Futhermore, the bookkeeping feature in F3N permits detailed quantitative representations of cropland changes in the Canton of Zürich.

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