ABSTRACT
Management of land use is an essentially spatial activity, since the use of land is intimately tied to the land’s location, to the properties of the site, and to the site’s geographic situation. To manage land wisely we need to know as much as possible about the land itself, including information on prior uses, drainage, soils, slope, and many other site factors; and also about its situation with respect to the properties of neighbouring land and details of nearby relevant activities. This is ideal territory for geographic information systems, with their ability to store representations of the Earth’s surface and its characteristics as digitized maps and images. It is also prime territory for spatial analysis, the subject of this chapter.
