Land Suitability Evaluation of Rainfed Barley Using Analytical Hierarchy Process Technique and GIS in a Part of Kuhin Area

Land utilization has tremendously been increased as a result of growing the population. Therefor it’s necessary to utilized the lands in accordance with their potential to increase their productivity and sustainability. As assessing the land suitability is a multifactorial issue, it’s needed a special technique to assess all the factors simultaneously. In this way, multi-criteria decision making methods (such as the Analytical hierarchical process) are widely used. The purpose of the present study is the land suitability assessment of rainfed barley in a part of kuhin area with 500 ha land using Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) and GIS. According to the study of 23 soil profiles, region aerial photos interpretation (1/40000), soil morphological characteristics in 16 different units (land units) the land evaluation was carried out. For this, 9 criteria including CaCo3%, OC%, Surface gravel%, depth, texture, apparent CEC, pH, slope% and climate condition were selected as the effective factors on barley growth. The weight for each factor was calculated using 30 questionnaires which were completed by the experts and software of Expert Choice, then the overall weight for each criterion on was obtained by multiplying the normalized attributes and relative weights. The results showed that among 16 land units the maximum and minimum calculated indices were 64.25 (unit 11) and 37.12 (unit 4), respectively. Also in all units the maximum and minimum weight related to slope and climate, respectively.