Land Suitability Analysis for Different Crops: A Multi Criteria Decision Making Approach using Remote Sensing and GIS

Land evaluation procedure given by FAO for soil site suitability for various land utilization types has been used to assess the land suitability for different crops and for generating cropping pattern for kharif (summer) and rabi (winter) seasons in Kheragarah tehsil of Agra. Kheragarah tehsil suffers from many types of land degradation such as such as salinity, watelogging, ravines, degraded hills and rock quarries (AIS & LUS, 2000). The database on soil, land use/land cover was generated from data derived from IRS -P6 remote sensing satellite and soil survey to perform an integrated analysis in the geographic information system environment. Agricultural and non-agricultural lands were delineated using the Decision Tree Classifier (DTC) and non-agricultural areas were masked for removal from future analysis. Different soil chemical parameters and physical parameters were evaluated for different crops. Subsequently all of them were integrated using a multi criteria decision making and GIS to generate the land suitability maps for various crops. Kharif and rabi season cropping patterns maps were developed by integrating crop suitability maps for the winter and summer seasons separately. Results indicated that about 55 % is highly suitable (S1) for sugarcane and 60%, 54% and 48 % of the area are moderately suitable (S2) for cultivation pearl millet, mustard and rice respectively. 50 % of the area is found to be marginally suitable (S3) for growing maize. It was also found that better land use options could be implemented in different land units as the conventional land evaluation methods suffer from limitation of spatial analysis for the suitability of various crops.