Land suitability evaluation using GIS-based multi-criteria decision making for bio-fuel crops cultivation in KhonKaen, Thailand

Abstract

The effective Multi-criteria Decision Making (MCDM) has been adopted by this study. Several studies agreed that one of the understandable principles of the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) MCDM can be able to work on multiple criteria analysis. It can deal with the data uncertainties among several criteria which is the strength point to be chosen for land suitability evaluation for biofuel crops cultivation in KhonKaen, Thailand. Due to this study aims to allocate the scarcely land availability for the most suitable crops and turn into the higher beneficial incomes for farmers. Therefore, the sixteen criterion layers that related to the selected crop requirements were analysed using the GIS based approach. These include soil texture, soil reaction, soil drainage, soil depth, soil cat-ion exchange capacity (CEC), ground water, stream water, irrigation zone, slope, elevation, aspect, erosion, soil salinity, drought, rainfall and humidity. The results shown based on the objectives in different degrees. The suitable areas were extracted by matching the potential suitable areas with the existing land use dataset. It shown the total areas of land allocations by MCDM is as 71.86% and by individual crops in the three suitable classes that the rice areas should be preserved around 32.02% while the rest areas of around 24.34%, 10.87% and 4.63% were for sugarcane, oil palm and cassava respectively. While the results of total areas by FAO is 66.76% and provided the total areas by individual crops as around 28.94%, 25.92%, 8.35% and 3.52% for rice, sugarcane, oil palm and cassava respectively. The results can be simulated by multiplying the average cost and benefit values with the suitable areas to visualise the potential budgets and potential incomes for the decision makers