Abstract
Turkey is the largest hazelnut producer and exporter in the world with approximately 75% worldwide production and 70-75% of world exports, yet according to FAO; annual yield gain rate is significantly lower than Italy and USA. While Turkey produces 0.94 ton/hectare hazelnut, average yield rates for USA, Italy and Spain are 2.6 ton/hectare, 1.68 ton/hectare and 1 ton/hectare, respectively. Hazelnut production in Turkey is primarily concentrated along Black Sea coast centered Giresun and Trabzon provinces. The purpose of this study is to propose a methodology to further improve the efficiency in hazelnut production by determining the most significant geographical criteria and using them for spatial queries and analysis in ArcGIS environment to detect most fertile hazelnut plantation areas. For the study, the Surmene district of Trabzon is selected for pilot region. A thematic map of hazelnut plantation areas created from the classification of WorldView-2 image of the district was used as the base map. Furthermore, a database is created with layers and cost maps using multicriteria decision methods. Detected most suitable areas for hazelnut production area are compared with the present situation. Proposed methodology and the database can be used by officials for better management of hazelnut production in Turkey, therefore in the world.
Highlights
Turkey, the leading hazelnut producer and exporter in the world, makes 79% of the entire hazelnut production
The data was classified into seven classes as forest, hazelnut, tea, residential area 1, residential area 2, soil and shadow
They integrated the texture information extracted by using the GLCM (GrayLevel Co-occurance Matrix), NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index), Gabor filter and Curvelet transformation to the Random Forest classifier to separate the tea and hazelnut products from other spectrally similar vegetation
Summary
The leading hazelnut producer and exporter in the world, makes 79% of the entire hazelnut production. Spain and USA are other important hazelnut exporters When it comes to hazelnut importation, European countries, which have advanced food industry with products such as chocolate and candy, are more dominant (Aktaş et al, 2009). Hazelnut product provides a 1.5 billion dollars of foreign currency inflow, and a significant amount of the population rely on it as a mean of living Another socioeconomic reason that the hazelnut product plays an important role in Turkey’s economy is that it can be turned into a semi-finished product and it provides an important source of employment in marketing stage (Yazıcı, 2013). Turkey is still behind of the hazelnut producers like Italy and USA in terms of the yield obtained from hazelnut cultivation. The answers of these questions were sought in this study:
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