Assessment of land suitability potentials for agriculture using a remote sensing and GIS based approach

Land suitability potential evaluation is an important step to detect the environmental limit in sustainable land use planning. It deals with the assessment of land performances for the specific use that is crop production. In the present study, a land suitability evaluation in a watershed has been carried out through close examination of the indicators of land suitability. The parameters taken into consideration were soil texture, organic matter content, soil depth, slope and land use/land cover. Satellite images of the study area have been classified for land use/land cover map preparation, while toposheet and ancillary data have been used for slope maps and soil properties determination. An integrated land suitability potential (LSP) index was computed considering the contribution of various parameters of land suitability. The watershed was categorized as good, fair, moderate, average, poor and not suitable by adopting the logical criteria. These categories were arrived at by integrating the various layers with corresponding weights in a geographical information system (GIS). The study demonstrates that a watershed can be categorized into spatially distributed agriculture potential zones based on the soil properties, terrain characteristics and analysing present land use.