Abstract
Abstract. The central agricultural region, a typically main agricultural zone of Mongolia. The area has undergone rapid agricultural land-use changes including land reclamation and cropland abandonment in the last decades due to growing population and food demand, climatic variability, and land-use policy. The utilization of the land is often unmatched with the inherent suitability of the land. Identification of the spatial distribution of suitable areas for cropland is essential for sustainable land-use recommendation. The objective of this study to delineate the areas suitable for cropland in the central agricultural region using a GIS-based multi-criteria evaluation of biophysical factors and multi-sensor data. We used 47 metrological station data of 10 years including temperature, precipitation, and solar radiation with topographic, soil property, landscape, and natural region map. The results indicate a suitable location and extent of crop farming areas at different suitability levels. The results can be used to identify priority areas for crop farming and sustainable land-use management.
Highlights
The central region of Mongolia, a typical agro-pastoral transitional zone, has undergone rapid agricultural land-use changes including land reclamation and cropland abandonment in past decades due to growing population and food demand, climatic variability, and land-use policy
The results indicate a suitable location and extent of crop farming areas at different suitability levels
The aim of this study was to determine the present croplands in the central agricultural region of Mongolia that is to find alternative areas suitable for agriculture using GIS and weighted overlay methods
Summary
The central region of Mongolia, a typical agro-pastoral transitional zone, has undergone rapid agricultural land-use changes including land reclamation and cropland abandonment in past decades due to growing population and food demand, climatic variability, and land-use policy. Identification of the spatial distribution of suitable areas for cropland is essential for sustainable land-use recommendation. Crop-land suitability analysis is a prerequisite to achieve optimum utilization of the available land resources for sustainable agricultural production. One of the most important and urgent problems in Mongolia is to improve agricultural land management and cropping patterns to increase the agricultural production with efficient use of land resources. Maximum likelihood supervised classification was applied to Landsat TM and ETM images acquired in 1989 and 2000, respectively, to map cropland area cover changes in the Selenge province of Mongolia. The objective of this study to delineate the areas suitable for cropland in the central agricultural region using a GIS-based multi-criteria evaluation of biophysical factors and multi-sensor data. The results can be used to identify priority areas for crop farming and sustainable land-use management
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