Over-use of fertilizer in paddy fields could lead to agro-environmental pollution. Therefore, the Paddy Fertilizer Recommendation System (PFRS) application package was designed to aid in the dissemination of fertilizer recommendations for paddy fields. PFRS utilized geographical information system (GIS) ActiveX Controls, enabling the user to select a location of interest linked to a spatial database of paddy field soil characteristics. The application package also incorporated different soil fertilizer recommendation methods, forming a relational database. The application's structure consisted primarily of building database queries using Standard Query Language (SQL) constructed during run-time, based on user provided spatial parameters of a selected location, the type of soil desired and paddy production criteria. PFRS, which was comprised of five modules including: File, View, Edit, Layer and Fertilizer/Model, provided the user with map-based fertilizer recommendations based on selected soil nutrient P and K map layers as well as N characteristics and land use maps.
An integrated remote sensing (RS) and geographic information system (GIS) technique was employed to characterize the spatial distribution of the risk of soil erosion by water on Latakia district, Syria. The universal soil loss equation (USLE) was used to calculate the annual soil loss rates for Latakia soils. Mainly, remote sensing data, soil survey, land use inventory, elevation data and climatic atlases are used as resource data sets to generate USLE factor values. The results revealed that integration of GIS/RS with USLE was a practical and effective approach for monitoring soil erosion over large areas.
