Summary:

Land consolidation is a complex process requiring the consideration of rich resources of data on the land under consolidation, preferences of participants of the consolidation regarding arrangement of newly projected parcels, performance of a number of spatial analyses, and taking decisions concerning optimal design solutions among many potential scenarios. Such a multi-aspect process requires the development of tools in the environment being able to face these criteria. Such an environment is currently constituted by Geographical Information Systems. The technological advantages of those systems in the process of transformation of rural areas are appreciated in a number of countries. This is exemplified by numerous international publications on the subject. In Poland, however, the systems are not fully exploited in the execution of particular stages of the land consolidation process. This article presents an example application of spatial analysis in the spatial management of rural areas. It assesses the risk of water erosion of a loess area in the northern part of the Harta village (Podkarpackie Voivodeship) based on basic criteria, namely water conditions, land use, and land relief, with the application of ArcGIS ESRI software. The source data (the registration database, ortophotomap, and soil-agricultural map at a scale of 1:5000) were organised in the form of a file geobasis.