Zoning Capability Olive Cultivation in the Province on the Basis of Physiographic and Climatic Data

One of the main and known principles of sustainable development of agriculture is applying the agricultural lands based on their potential for the most appropriate use of agriculture. The aim of this research is zoning the capability of Mazandaran province's lands for cultivation of olive in relation with the desirable climatic needs of olive based on multi criteria decision making methods in GIS environment.The informative sources in this research are the climatic databases and physiographic resources. The climatic base data, including temperature, precipitation, freezing days, relative humidity, evaporation and transpiration were collected from the data of 28 synoptic, climatology and precipitation stations of the general offices of the concerned province were collected from the establishment time up to 2013 and the physiographic data include the elevation, slope , Direction, land use, soil and land suitability map. By using AHP method, the weighting criteria of each of the main data were determined: climate 0.590, topography 0.244, land capability of 0.112 and land use 0.044, and by overlapping them in GIS, the final map of olive cultivation for Mazandaran province was prepared. It was found that 21.2% is very suitable, 32.2% suitable, 34.2% medium and 12.3% unsuitable for olive cultivation. Therefore, the most suitable areas for cultivating olive, are the middle or foothills of Mazandaran province with height up to 900 meters From the sea level. The annual temperature of these areas is 17 to 20 degrees and their annual rainfall is 500 to 800 millimeters.