Geographic Information System-Based Evaluation Method of Crop-Soil Suitability in Mentougou District

摘要

The evaluation of crop-soil suitability is considered as the most important base for land sustainable, especially for the suburbs of metropolis where the lands were becoming more and more limited with the development of urbanization. This paper takes Mentougou district of Beijing as the case, an urban region with rapid area's expansion. Due to a large amount of information including the topography features, soil conditions, agricultural infrastructure and geo-environment related to the crop-soil suitability, it is a complex and systematic project with multi-level, multi-objective, multi-property characteristics to study the crop-soil suitability. Therefore an integrated modeling approach using the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and the Geographic Information System (GIS) is required to have been developed for energy resource allocation in this study, as is with AHP to identify and weight criterion, and GIS for spatial analysis and mapping tools. A detailed sensitivity analysis of nine quantitative and three qualitative criteria has been carried out, and the weights of evaluation indexes are determined using AHP. The input indexes are prepared in raster map format in the GIS environment by using ERDAS IP ver. 9.1 and the output is generated in the form of thematic map showing the suitability of each cell (20 m_20 m) for the selected crop. The integrated modeling approach is found efficient and useful in assessing the crop-soil suitability of Meitougou, and it could be adopted to develop similar models for crop-soil suitability evaluation in other areas in China.