Giorgi Misheladze: “Land Fund Data Will Be Updated in Four Regions This Year”
The data in the unified database of Georgia’s land resources includes information on actual land use and land cover across the entire territory of Georgia.
Data has been obtained using topographic maps, archival land-use plans of former collective farms, vineyard and hazelnut cadastre data, and through the photo-interpretation of orthophoto maps. The data is processed according to the international "CORINE" classifier and is used to define land cover and land-use types within a geographical area and to assign unique classification codes.
"The classifier includes 44 classes, however, taking into account the physical-geographical characteristics of Georgia, an adapted version has been used in our case," stated Giorgi Misheladze, Chairman of the National Agency for Sustainable Land Management and Land Use Monitoring.
Data covering more than 6.4 million hectares of land was processed using the Agency's administrative resources. According to Giorgi Misheladze, the data will be updated annually. This year, the data update is underway for the regions of the Autonomous Republic of Adjara, Imereti, Guria, and Samtskhe-Javakheti.
"This is a labor-intensive activity, but within our resources, we strive to ensure everything is covered. Unfortunately, there were no ready-made qualified personnel in this field in the country, therefore, we had to recruit and retrain 40 individuals," Misheladze stated.
According to him, the relative error of the map corresponds to a 1:2,000 scale accuracy, which signifies quite high resolution, however, the goal is to further reduce the scale to provide even greater precision.
