For modern management of the conditions and variations of land resources with information technology, it is of great significance to improve the scientific planning and reasonable development of land resources, guarantee the dynamic balance of cropland quantum and achieve the modernized management and socialized service of land resources. In recent decade years, a mass of basic surveys have been carried out in the field of land management. The first hand information has been gained for land-use, land tenure and land evaluation covering the whole country from plot to village, town, county, city and province. However, due to straggly methods in management, transmission and analysis of the data, its safety and reliability has been endangered heavily, and its updating and application have been restricted. Therefore, the Chinese government has launched a project of digital land in order to improve the management of basic data of land resources, and change its application conditions.

This project mainly consists of six tasks including database construction and its application research of land resources, database construction of the present land-use , dynamic remote sensing monitoring of land-use, cadastral of townships, basis price of urban land and farmland rating. Through implementation of these tasks, construction of basic database system will be achieved, distributed in the whole country at each level. The target would be reached for exchange and sharing of high-capacity spatial information with advanced technology and rapid response, so as to provide land management and overall society with basic information service of land resources, and improve the whole level of land resource informatization.

Since beginning in 1999, and based on guiding ideology of “New train of thoughts, New technology, New mechanism”, some key technical research has been carried out, including sustainable land management and “Digital Land”, new methods of attributes data link of land-use database on the county (city)-level, information system of farmland rating. The key results achieved mainly include that: (1) Based on formulation of “Standard for Construction of Land-Use Database on County (City)-Level” and “Technical Specifications on Construction of Land-Use Database on County (City)-Level”, the work of land-use database construction has been spread over more than 500 counties (cities) of 30 provinces (municipality directly under the Central Government, autonomous region). Construction has been basically completed. (2) Institute of China Land Surveying and Planning has built up the remote sensing monitoring database of the state-level development zones. This has provided accurate and practicable basic database for cleaning up and rectifying the development zones. In addition, a solid foundation has been laid on early-warning and forecasting of land-use of the state-level development zones. (3) The construction of land register database has been completed in cities of Shanghai, Kunming, Lanzhou, Haikou, Langfang and Laiwu etc. .It has been formed for socialized enquiry service system of land register information to improve the socialized service level. (4) The construction of a farmland rating database has also been accomplished to promote the transfer from “Quantity Management” to “Coordinated and unified management way of quantity, quality and ecology”.