Australian agricultural resources: A national scale land capability map

Ongoing land clearing is a key driver of biodiversity loss and climate change. Effective action to halt land clearing and land degradation ultimately relies on understanding patterns of land capability for production uses, in particular agricul-ture, as a key driver of land use. Here we describe a na-tional agricultural land capability map for Australia, based on harmonized state agricultural land capability datasets and modelled pastoral capability. State-level agricultural land ca-pability datasets capture regional variations in crop selection and suitability. Hence, we reclassified these datasets to fit a nationally consistent land capability ranking scheme. For re-gions in which agricultural capability data was not available, we modelled agricultural and pastoral capability and mapped this to the same ranking scheme. The national land capabil-ity dataset fills an immediate knowledge need for Australia. This dataset has wide potential for utilization, such as for ret-rospective analysis of land use policies and prospective re-gional planning initiatives to ensure forward looking policies and land use plans optimize land allocation.(c) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc.This is an open access article under the CC BY license( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )