Ninety percent of the 6.1 million population of Himachal Pradesh inhabits over 17,000 villages spread
over the mountain landscape from low hills to high mountain areas. The dominant features of hill
farming in Himachal are largely dry rain fed farming on sloping marginal farmlands and small land
holdings of households. Subsistence farming on these farmlands was dominating until past decade.
Since then a wave of change is underway towards diversification to high values cash crops farming.
It is evident that such a paradigm shift in agriculture is not an easy task for decision makers and that
it should be supported by science based information.
A first step in planning a change in agricultural systems is a delineation of production domains also
called agro ecological zonation. Agro-ecological zoning (AEZ) is a methodology to cluster
determinants of agricultural systems into homogeneous units. These units can be of great
importance in sustainable agricultural planning. There is a strong need for an updated zonation,
because now an outdated map made in the eighties is used (fig. 1). Since agricultural land use isinfluenced by many biophysical parameters (e.g. physiographic variables, climate, soils, land cover,
and productivity) it is imperative to have these datasets spatially available and in combination with a
set of decision rules an agro-ecological zonation can be performed. Geo-IT tools can play an
important role in the dynamic mapping of agro-ecological zones. On a global scale such an approach
has been stressed (FAO, 1995).