Weighted overlay based land suitability analysis of agriculture land in Azad Jammu and Kashmir using GIS and AHP

Agriculture land suitability plays an important role in sustainable agriculture production by improving the use of current land resources and in the identification of new land that maybe prepare for agriculture. The present research aimed to focus on the agricultural land suitability of Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), where the existing agriculture land is only 8% and dense forest and glaciers are covering 46.06% of the total area. Based on the literature review and local expert’s knowledge, eight different criteria have been taken to scale the available land for the suitability of agriculture practices. These parameters are soil orders, soil pH, Land-use Land-cover (LULC), slope, elevation, temperature, precipitation, and Potential Evapotranspiration (PET). Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) technique in integration with Geographical Information System (GIS) and Weighted Overlay Analysis (WOA) had been incorporated to classify the land for agriculture production. In AHP, weights were determined with the use of pairwise comparison matrix based on expert opinions. According to the guidelines of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the land suitability map was divided into five zones. After subtracting the areas of permanent features like mountains, forest, and glaciers, it was estimated that a highly suitable area was 13.21%, moderately suitable area was 11.61%, marginally suitable area was 13.14% and 62.05% was not suitable permanently. It is concluded that the integration of GIS and AHP in land suitability, is efficient and it will help the policymakers to improve the management of their land resources.