Crop-land Suitability Analysis Using a Multicriteria Evaluation & Gis Approach

Crop-land suitability analysis is a prerequisite to achieve optimum utilization of the available land resources for sustainable agricultural production. One of the most important and urgent problems in Bangladesh is to improve agricultural land management and cropping patterns to increase the agricultural production with efficient use of land resources. In Bangladesh, agriculture is the mainstay of national economy and rice is the major food but the production is very low. In particular the rice production of Bangladesh does not meet the demands due to its rapidly growing population. The aim of this study is to determine physical land suitability for rice crop using a Multi-Criteria Evaluation (MCE) & GIS approach and to compare present land use vs. potential land use. The aim in integrating Multi-Criteria Evaluation with Geographical Information Systems (GIS) is to provide more flexible and more accurate decisions to the decision makers in order to evaluate the effective factors. The study was carried out in Haripur Upazila, Thakurgaon district of north-west part in Bangladesh. Relevant biophysical variables of soil and topography were considered for suitability analysis. All data were stored in Arc GIS 9.0 environment and the factor maps were generated. For Multi-Criteria Evaluation (MCE), Pairwise Comparison Matrix known as Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) was applied and the suitable areas for rice crop were identified. To generate present land use/cover map, Terra/ASTER 22 March 2003 satellite image was classified using ERDAS Imagine 8.7 by means of supervised classification. According to the present land use/cover map, the rice cultivated area was 6727.88 ha. Finally, we overlaid the land use/cover map with the suitability map for rice production to identify differences and similarities between the present and potential land use. However, the crop-land evaluation results of the present study identified that in the study area, 37 percent of total rice crop currently being used was under highly suitable areas and 25 percent was under moderately suitable areas. A substantial portion (35 percent) was under marginally suitable areas. The results showed that agricultural practiced, which prevailed in the study area didn’t match with the potential suitability in the marginally suitable area. Thus, the average yield of the study area was substantially affected because of a significant proportion of rice crop was under marginally suitable areas. This research provided information at local level that could be used by farmers to select cropping patterns and suitability.