Ecological Potential Evaluation for the Irrigated Agriculture Using the Current Models and the New Model of EMOLUP for the Firozabad County

The process of assessing the ecological potential of the land, or measuring the potential of the land, is an important step before implementation. The Firoozabad Township is located in the Province of Fars. Irrigated farming provides the major income for this township. The main purpose of this research was to evaluate the ecological potential for irrigated agriculture in the Firoozabad Township based on the corrective approach of the current models and to present a new EMOLUP model (Eco- Socioeconomic Model of Land Use Planning) using the GIS. To evaluate the popular models, namely: the including Makhdoom, maximum limitation, arithmetic mean, EMOLUP model using the geometric mean, simple weight arithmetic mean (based on indicator and criteria), weight arithmetic mean (based on indicator and criteria) with considering a limiting factor was used for an assessment. To increase the accuracy of irrigated agriculture utilization, the indexes of water resources degradation and the drought risk were also added. The results indicated that the EMOLUP model had the highest overall accuracy (95.82), kappa coefficient (0.915), in-class coefficient (10.20), and average accuracy (96.36) among all of the used models. The simple indicator arithmetic mean and the simple weighted indicator arithmetic mean models showed the lowest overall accuracy among all methods. By adding these two indicators, using the EMOLUP model, and evaluating accuracy indicators with ground reality, it may be concluded that the process of classifying ecological potential assessment with the above method is more logical than other common methods used in this country.