Zoning of Agricultural Climate of Strawberry Cultivation Using Geographic Information System (Case Study: Mazandaran Province)

One of the main pillars of agricultural planning is the identification of agricultural climatic units. An agricultural climatic unit is a unit in which the ground features and climatic elements are considered as integrated units, and each unit can have different characteristics. In this regard, the condition of Sari station was considered as a sample strawberry cultivating area in Mazandaran province. For this purpose, climatic and environmental data and statistics of Mazandaran province were collected in terms of layers of ground and climatic factors and evaluated using Excel software. GIS software (1) has been used to draw up climatic and descriptive maps of the province. From ground factors, topographic layers, land use, slope and type of soil and from climatic elements, precipitation and annual temperature are considered. Using the special functions of the GIS system, first a weighted value was given to the layers according to the potentials of strawberry cultivation, and then they were combined in a final map. The final map indicates the ability of different regions of Mazandaran province to grow strawberries. The results indicate the accuracy of the map and the ability of the GIS to help provide an integrated analysis and homogeneous agricultural climatic units.