Welsh Journals

Soils and Land Use Planning. D.A.Davidson. Longman (Topics in Applied Geography), London and New York. (1980), pp. 129. ISBN 0 582 48985 7. Price (paperback) £ 3.95. This book, in the series Topics in Applied Geography, is concerned with the application of soil information* to land use planning, and examines the various techniques which are used to evaluate the suit- ability of soil for a range of agricultural and non-agricultural land uses. Davidson's message is that there is available not only a growing body of soil information to aid land use planning, but also a wide spectrum of interpretation and evaluation techniques. However, even in countries with well-established soil surveys there are marked differences in the extent to which soil data are used in land use plann- ing. The book is based on an introductory course on applied pedology to middle level university geography students and it is essentially a review of methods and applications of soil survey and land evaluat- ion, with examples from a wide range of countries. In Chapter 1, the need for careful evaluation of soils in relation to land use is stressed from a global to a local scale. Chapter 2 summarizes tech- niques of soil survey and land use capability concurrent with exam- ples from U.S.A., Britain and Canada. The third chapter deals with principles and methods of land assessment and examines various trends. Of particular importance is the trend towards more ecological approaches in which landscape is treated as a functional entity. Other trends are the developments of computer-based systems of storage and retrieval, the running away from rather generalised assessment of land towards more specific ones for defined land uses and the emphasis on quantitative methods, so that not only are land attri- butes measured, but quantitative predictions about land yield or performance are produced. Chapter 4 deals with soil assessment for particular purposes, taking the examples of forestry, irrigation and urban development, the latter illustrated by Townsville in Aust- ralia where the engineering properties of soil types are considered. Chapter 5 is on the application of soil surveys in the Netherlands and here Davidson has deliberately chosen a country in which soil data are incorporated into land use planning decisions to an exceptional degree. There are examples of how soil survey information is inter- preted, not only for agriculture, but also engineering, recreation and urban development. Soil surveys are an essential part of land re- clamation schemes and influence farm size, layout, rent and general farming systems in a new polder. Similarly, detailed soil surveys form the basis of schemes aimed at the consolidation of small and frag- mented farms. The text draws heavily on a vast amount of literature, often in the form of official reports. Davidson has provided summaries of the most important references and these are faithful to the original. He has used tables and figures whenever possible so that the main body of the various land evaluation systems are helpful and he cites other