Land suitability assessment for perennial crops using remote sensing and Geographic Information Systems: A case study in northwestern Egypt

摘要

The main objective of this study was to develop a Geographic Information Systems-based model for land suitability assessment for guava, olive and date palm in the North-western coast of Egypt. Soil, climatic and landscape database as well as satelliteimage have been integrated through Geographic Information Systems (GIS). A Landsat ETM+ image dated 2001, was classified using maximum likelihood classifier to produce land use/land covet map. Physical and chemical analyses of 57 soil profiles were interpolated to produce continuous land characteristic maps that are relevant to the requirement of the considered crops. These maps with climate and land cover map were integrated using GIS to produce land suitability maps for guava, olive and date palm. Two types of land suitability maps were produced in this study namely: Continuous land suitability maps and conventional land suitability classified maps. For each of them six land suitability maps were produced for the three crops in which three are for actual land suitability and the other three for potential land suitability. It was found that the suitability was higher for date palm followed by olive and the lowest suitability was assigned for guava.