Soils of Himachal Pradesh: Inventory for Land Use Planning

摘要

Soil is the most precious natural resource. Maintaining soils in a state of high productivity on sustainable basis is important for meeting the basic needs of the people. Therefore, knowledge of soils with respect to their extent, distribution, characteristics and potential use is important for optimizing land use. It is still more important for hilly state like Himachal Pradesh, which is highly prone to the tremendous loss of soil and plant nutrients due to steeply sloping landscape, and exploitation of natural resources like soils and forests. Keeping in view the above points, the present study of preparing soil resource inventory was undertaken. Though, generalized soil map of some districts and detailed maps of some local areas have been prepared in the past, it is for the first time that the entire state has been surveyed (on scale 1:250,000) following a systematic and uniform approach. Also, an attempt has been made to identify the important properties for plant growth, major problems and potentials of the state, which are pre-requi-site for any sustainable land use plan.