T. Tóth, S. Vinogradov, T. Hermann, F. Speiser, T. Németh. 2007. Soil bonitation and
 land valuation with D-e-meter system as a tool of sustainable land use. Cereal Research
Communications. 35 (2) 1221-1224.

Abstract

The importance of land valuation is increasing all over the world (Burrough, 1987,
Rossiter, 1996,). Paralel to present day technical improvements, there are newer and
newer concepts formulated for effective soil bonitation and land valuation (Lemmens
and Kurm, 2000).
In Hungary after the one and half century utilization of the „Gold Crown” land value
index (Domsodi, 2006), in spite of new initiatives (Forizs et al., 1971) there is no
functional modern land valuation. In order to improve the sustainability of the land
use and to facilitate the land appraisal, a new soil bonitation index was developed
(Gaal et al., 2003). The new system is based on the D-e-Meter soil quality index (or
bonitation number) which is calculated on-line with the help of a complex
Geographical Information System of soil and other maps.
The concept of D-e-Meter soil quality index has being extended from croplands for
other land uses, such as grasslands (Der, 2003) and forests (Bidlo et al., 2003).
In our earlier publications we described the concepts and difficulties of coupling the
physical characteristics of lands (Hermann et al., 2006, Toth et al., 2006a) as shown
by the D-e-Meter soil quality index with the economics of land use (Toth et al.,
2006b, c).
The necessary following step of the development was the detailed conceptualization
of the land valuation and its realization in the GIS system and this publication will
focus on these achievements (Szõcs et al., 2006, Fekete et al., 2006).