Land suitability assessment for rice crop using geospatial techniques

Land suitability assessment studies for crop production in certain areas provide opportunities and limitations to decision makers and thus helping in planning for alternative land uses in the unsuitable areas. The objective of this study was to evaluate the suitability of land for rice cultivation in Sheikhupura and Nankana Sahib Districts of Punjab. The methodology adopted combines most aspects of soil, environment and ground water quality attributes that affect crop suitability at large. Suitability maps of the districts for rice cultivation were established by scanning, Georeferencing and digitizing the SSOP soil maps, further interpolation, classification /reclassification, merging and dissolving of vector data was carried out, then all criteria layers were rasterized. Further, pairwise comparison method in the form of Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) was used to compute significance weights of different controlling parameters for assessing suitable land for rice cultivation in the study area.