FAO Agro-ecological zones (GAEZ)

The GAEZ Data Portal provides free access to data on agricultural resources and potential, allows visualization of data, and provides the user with various analysis outputs.

FAO and IIASA have developed the Agro-Ecological Zones (AEZ) methodology and database over the past 30 years for assessing agricultural resources and potential. The GAEZ database provides the agronomic backbone for various applications including the quantification of land productivity. Results are commonly aggregated for current major land use/cover patterns and by administrative units, land protection status, or broad classes reflecting infrastructure availability and market access conditions.

This is the most ambitious assessment yet and makes publicly available the entire database with many terabytes of data covering five thematic areas:·

Land and water resources, including soil resources, terrain resources, land cover, protected areas and selected socio economic and demographic data;·
Agro-climatic resources, including a variety of climatic indicators;·
Suitability and potential yields for up to 280 crops/land utilization types under alternative input and management levels for historical, current and future climate conditions;·
Downscaled actual yields and production of main crop commodities, and·
Yield and production gaps, in terms of ratios and differences between actual yield and production and potentials for main crops.With this large amount of data, a new system had to be created to make the data accessible to a variety of users.