Experience of developing a local GIS for irrigated land of the Volga-Akhtuba floodplain in the territory of the Volgograd region

Abstract

The Volga-Akhtuba floodplain is a particularly valuable natural object in the south of Russia, located on the territory of three constituent entities of our country. There are three regional and one federal protected areas. Trends in the agricultural use of floodplain lands are aimed at increasing acreage and intensifying agriculture. Under these conditions, the risks of various pollution of soil and water resources increase. Land use control, as well as sown areas, is impossible without knowledge of the current state and location of cultivated irrigated lands. The modern policy of the state is aimed at involving unused agricultural land, one of the stages of which is updating information. The paper presents the results of the development of a local geoinformation system for irrigated lands of the Volga-Akhtuba floodplain within the Volgograd region. The purpose of the work is to create and maintain the functioning of a local geoinformation system of irrigated fields, natural and anthropogenic objects that form the general attractiveness of sites in terms of resuming economic activity, in the context of rural settlements located within the Volga-Akhtuba floodplain on the territory of the Volgograd areas. The author has developed thematic geoinformation layers in three blocks: natural, economic and analytical. The main materials for compiling the thematic layers were Earth remote sensing data of high and ultra-high spatial resolution. Substantiated are various methods for the formation of geoinformation layers, as well as the problems of identifying irrigated lands by automated methods and the prospects for automating the process of determining the use of irrigated lands. The general structure of a local GIS consists of more than 20 layers and 50 attribute datasets. A local geoinformation system can be presented as a web GIS and used in landscape and environmental studies, as well as to optimize measures to involve agricultural land.