AHP and GIS based land suitability analysis for Cihanbeyli (Turkey) County

Abstract

This paper offers an integrated approach to contribute to the process of agricultural land suitability analysis using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Geographic Information System (GIS) methods. The paper addresses Cihanbeyli, the largest county in Turkey in terms of area, and focuses on determining sustainable strategies to activate/improve agriculture as a main source of income, thereby improving the economy of the region. The combined AHP and GIS methodology which consists of stages such as structuring AHP hierarchy, describing evaluation criteria, doing pairwise comparisons, and preparing criterion maps and land suitability maps has been applied to identify the areas suitable for irrigated and dry farm agriculture. A comparison of the final land suitability map with current land use has revealed that an area of 294.73 km2 (7.18 %) is suitable for irrigation and an area of 2323.45 km2 (56.77 %) is suitable for dry farm agriculture. Additionally, the analysis clearly shows the necessity of a decrease in irrigated agricultural land and an increase in dry farm agricultural land. The applied AHP and GIS based agricultural land suitability analysis is useful in (1) referring agricultural activities to the areas that have good physical and environmental conditions for agriculture, thus achieving maximum agricultural efficiency in countryside, (2) improving non-agricultural uses in the areas that are unsuitable for agriculture and have low efficiency, (3) avoiding the construction and environmental pressures on suitable farmland, so conducing to better land-use planning decisions.