1Department of Geographic, Faculty of Arts & Humanities, King
Abdulaziz University, Saudi Arabia. 2Department of GIS, Faculty of Engineering, School of Survey, Sudan
University of Science and Technology, Sudan.
*Corresponding author e-mail: rania58@gmail.com
There is a pressing
need to develop an optimal land evaluation decision support system to identify
the part of a region that selected crops could be grown in high yield. Matching
the requirement of land use with land’s capability ensures that production level
does not exceed the capacity the land can sustain. The purpose of this study is
to develop an agricultural land suitability evaluation system that relied on the
FAO framework of 1976, with some necessary modifications to suit the local
environmental conditions. The developed model for land suitability is based on a
classification structure rather than a set of guidelines as in FAO framework.
Fourteen land characteristics and their threshold values were determined and
grouped into nine land qualities. The land suitability model was constructed
with GIS capabilities and integrated with modeling function using Visual Basic.
The model was implemented and accepted by the Department of Agriculture in Kula
Lumpur. It showed that it can serve as a decision support tool for farmers and
decision makers.
Key words:
GIS, evaluation, land, decision support system, agriculture.
This is an open access article
published under the terms of the
Creative Commons Attribution
License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and
reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is
properly cited.
Cite this article as:
Elsheikh RFA (2015). GIS based land evaluation
decision support system. Acad. J. Agric. Res.
3(12): 369-380.
