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Not AvailableThe aim of the present study was to assess the suitable areas for maize (Zea mays L) in semi-arid ecosystem of Mysuru district of Karnataka, Southern India using integrated Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Geographic Information System (GIS) approach. In the present study, the parameters of soil depth, length of growing period (LGP), soil surface texture, soil drainage, organic carbon (OC), soil pH, slope and elevation were used. AHP method was used to determine the weights of the parameters and scores of the sub-parameters in the study. The modeling capabilities of GIS were used in weighted overlay analysis of input parameters in assessment of land suitability for maize cultivation. The analysis indicates that about 29.9% (188439.4 ha) of the study area is highly suitable, 15.3% (96213.3 ha) is moderately suitable and 18.5% (116671.7 ha) is marginally suitable for maize cultivation. The study demonstrates that the integrated AHP and GIS approach found to be very effective to increase the accuracy in land suitability assessment. The gap analysis between the suitable areas derived from the study and actual mean maize growing area during 2015–16 to 2017–18, shows that about 23.2% (146370.4 ha) of highly suitable and 38.4% (242556.7 ha) of highly and moderately suitable areas together are available to expand the maize cultivation in the district. 1. Introduction Global climate change is a widespread challenge in the twenty first century and has an impact on agriculture production and food security in many parts of the world (IPCC, 2007). To mitigate this inevitable challenge, optimum utilization of land resources and food security become the top agricultural policies in many developing countries in the recent past (FAO and TIPS, 2015). Utilization of agriculture land for longer period, regardless of land suitability bound to have more damage than to provide the resources (FAO, 1976). Hence, it necessitates to assess the land suitability for sustained crop production with minimum destruction to environment. Land suitability evaluation is an approach to assess the intrinsic and potential capabilities of land resources (Ramamurthy et al. 2018), and suitability for different objectives (FAO, 1976). Land suitability assessment enable us to measures the degree of land usefulness for potential land use by land requirement and qualities (FAO, 1976). The assessment of land suitability is a pre-requisite for optimum utilization of available land resources in a given area and provides information on the potentials and constraints (Ramamurthy et al. 2018). Land suitability studies guide to prescribe options of potential crops, which could be grown in a given soil unit to maximize crop production per unit of land, labour and inputs (Naidu et al. 2006). However, in many cases farmers grow different crops without giving much consideration to soil suitability. To assess the suitability of a given piece of land for crop production, appropriate criteria or combination of criterion need to be applied. FAO framework (FAO, 1976) combined with GIS based multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) found to be an effective approach to perform land suitability evaluation for a specific objective on the basis of a cohort of criteria that the selected location should possess (Malczewski, 2006). MCDA approach was successfully applied in evaluation of land suitability for various crops like cotton (Walke et al. 2012) and soybean (Kumar et al. 2017). Maize is one of the most versatile and multi-utility crops and it is known as ‘queen of cereals’ because of its highest genetic potential and it is the major source of food, feed, fodder and industrial raw material and provides huge opportunity for crop diversification. In India, not less than 15 million farmers are engaged in maize cultivation and it generates employment for more than 650 million man-days at farming and its related business ecosystem levels (FCCI, 2018). Importantly, maize contributes more than 2.0% to the total value of output from allNot Availabl