Policy implications of LESA factor and weight determination in Douglas County, Kansas
The Land Evaluation and Site Assessment System (LESA) developed by the United States Department of Agriculture Soil Conservation Service is designed as an aid to local planning officials to protect important agricultural lands. Preliminary LESA development for Douglas County, Kansas indicates the overall usefulness of the model for its designated purpose within Douglas County. However, model development also indicates several inherent problems with the original system, stemming predominantly from arbitrary weight recommendations and predetermined factor suppositions which do not reflect the needs of a given planning area. The effect of these recommendations and suppositions are most evident when there is a conflict of scale due to incorporation of both national and local standards through the LESA model.
Land Classification Research: A Retrospective and Agenda
Land classification is so central to geography that its use, and the use of its derivative and corresponding products, is seldom even questioned. Since its earliest implementations land classification has adapted to changes in geographic scale and in the nature of the categorical systematics upon which it is based. Land classification has changed in its techniques and in how it adapts to technological changes, particularly those related to remote sensing and geographic information systems. The adaptation of land classification to digital pixel-based classification spawned a wide range of land classification error analysis techniques. These techniques do not easily transfer to non-pixel based classification error analysis as recent research on rapid land assessment methodologies and land change error analysis has shown. This disparity suggests a need to reevaluate the very nature of land classification research. To begin such an evaluation, this lecture provides a retrospective on the roots of land classification research, examines some of the milestones of that research, and describes the divergent paths such research has taken. It examines the importance of land classification in these times of ever decreasing global resources, and reviews its potential legal, social, and economic implications. Based on this retrospective, this paper advances the need for geographic researchers to envision land classification not only as a set of techniques, but more generally to focus on systematic geography in all its facets as a research agenda in its own right.
Prime Lands—Definition and Policy Problems
As a proposed policy statement authored by an urban legislator, this quotation from proposed AB 15 seems to epitomize the increasingly popular cry to save or preserve prime agricultural land. Since prime connotates first in importance in terms of quality or value, intuitive support of such cries seems most appropriate.