Physical Land Suitability Assessment for Tea Cultivation Using GIS-Based Multi-Criteria Approach at Dabus Basin of Oromia Region, Southwest Ethiopia

Abstract

Tea is economically important export commodity for Ethiopia Predicting the physical land suitability of tea is vital to avoid a sightless expansion of tea plantations and significant to recognize the potential suitable area for tea to disseminate of tea plantations in the country. Land suitability analysis is pre-request for assigning specific land for specific purposes. The study incorporate applications of Geographic Information System, Remote Sensing and Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) to allocate suitability weights to criteria that influence tea plant's growth to produce a predictive suitability map for its cultivation. Topography, Soils, climatic and land use features were included in the process as an important contributing factor for tea plant's growth. Each of the evaluations criteria layers were classified into four suitability class of not suitable, less suitable, suitable, and highly suitable. The results indicated that important influential factors affecting tea cultivation suitability evaluation were Rainfall (23.9%) followed by soils pH (18.05%) Elevation (12.72%), land use (10.79%), Aspect (9.07%), soils texture (6.96%), Slope (6.43), soils Depth (5.25%) temperature (3.42%) and drainage class (3.42%) respectively with 8.23% consistency index. The results revealed that the moderately suitable suitability class occupied the largest proportion of Land (84.92%), followed by highly suitable area (11.42%) and the unsuitable area (3.66%). the study area were precipitation, soil reaction, Altitude, Aspect and current Land use were identified as main limiting factors for Tea productions.