#GlobalFarmReport #NewFarmsReport All farmers on the ground know their land as well as their own wrinkled hands, but totaling up all the worlds cropland is a difficult task. Yet the competition for land among developers, growers and other parties makes getting an accurate count of the worlds arable acres especially important as the planets population grows. Two new maps released Friday (Jan. 16) considerably improve estimates of the amount of land farmed in the world — one map reveals the worlds agricultural lands to a resolution of 1 kilometer, and the other provides the first look at the sizes of the fields being used for agriculture, the researchers said. Earlier studies estimated that the worlds cropland may cover an area between 1.22 billion and 1.71 billion hectares, a range that varies by more than 40 percent. The field-size map is really unique — no such global product currently exists, study co-author Linda See, a researcher at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, said in a statement. livescience/49497-farming-tracked-from-space.html?cmpid=559003
Posted on: Wed, 21 Jan 2015 07:54:55 +0000
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