Agricultural lands are essential for providing food and forage for maintaining a healthy environment. Growing human populations are placing increasing demands for new lands for agricultural production. At the same time, there is a need to maintain or increase our forest cover for biodiversity and carbon sequestration. Unfortunately, our land base is limited. Consequently, there is strong competition between those lands will be used for forestry and those that will be used for agriculture. Current assessments of agriculture and forested lands are often carried out by separate entities. Often, there is duplication of data collection, information gaps, etc. The bottom line is that we do not really know how much land currently serves the needs of agriculture and forestry, which lands are best suited for conversion to alternate use, and where they are located. In order for decision makers to make more informed decisions, we need complete and up-to-date geo-referenced inventories. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the problems of separate resource inventories and to present ways to overcome these problems by integrated assessments.
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