Multi Criteria Evaluation of Land Suitability for Agriculture Land Use Using Geographic Information System (Case Study: Qazvin Region)

Land evaluation is an integrated process for evaluating potential land productivity and land suitability for varied purposes. Since that agriculture has enormous environmental impacts on periurban regions, it is necessary to evaluate agriculture land use. This paper presents a technique of geographic information system (GIS) to evaluate the land for urban fringe agriculture of Qazvin. Based on field survey data analysis, identification and mapping of ecological factors in the region, such as physical parameters (Land use, Slope, Soil, and Precipitation) and biological parameters (Vegetation density) as major factors affecting the peri-urban agriculture land use was implemented by geographic information system (GIS). The Iran ecological model was applied to identify the priority weight of each factor. Therefore, the layers were overlaid by Weighted Linear Combination (WLC) to prepare the suitability map. The map was further scaled as six classes for the peri-urban agriculture. The results indicate that among 6 classes of agriculture land use in the region, class 5 entailes 31% of the area.