Assessment of the FAO traditional land evaluation methods, A case study: Iranian Land Classification method

Abstract

Land evaluation is a critical step in land-use planning. Although many methods have been developed since the formulation of the FAO framework for land evaluation, several of the more traditional approaches still remain in widespread use but have not been adequately evaluated. Contrary to more recent land evaluation systems, which need considerable data, these systems only require basic soil and landscape information to provide a general view of land suitability for major types of land use. As the FAO initially presented its qualitative framework for land-use planning, based on two previous methods developed in Iran and Brazil, in this study we assessed the reliability and accuracy of a traditional land evaluation method used in Iran, called land classification for irrigation (LCI), comparing its results with several qualitative and quantitative methods and actual yield values. The results showed that, although simpler than more recently developed methods, LCI provided reliable land suitability classes and also showed good relationships both with other methods analysed and with actual yields. Comparisons between qualitative and quantitative methods produced similar results for common crops (a barley-alfalfa-wheat-fallow rotation). However, these methods performed differently for opportunist crops (such as alfalfa) that are more dependent on income and market conditions than on land characteristics. In this work, we also suggest that using the FAO method to indicate LCI subclasses could help users or managers to recognize limitations for land-use planning.

Evaluation of Land Capability and Suitability Crop Production: Case Study in Halaib and Shalatien Region, South East Desert of Egypt

“…The main problem in Egypt is growing population very rapidly against food production during the last three decades (Hamza andMason, 2004 andAbdel-Hamid et al, 2010). Therefore, the efficient management of natural resources in Egypt is essential for ensuring food supplies and sustainability in agricultural development (FAO, 1993 andBodaghabadi et al, 2015). For that governorate exerts great efforts to recover the gap between population and food production (Sayed, 2013).…”

Database extension for digital soil mapping using artificial neural networks

“…The error matrix, or confusion matrix, permits the calculation of a range of measures that describe the accuracy of the predicted map with respect to the reference map. The following accuracy measurements were calculated from the confusion matrix (Congalton et al, 1983;Legros, 2006;Bagheri Bodaghabadi et al 2015b): With OR, the closer the value is to one (or %), the better the generalization of the ANN model. Nevertheless, and according to Behrens et al (2005), OAtest can be higher than OAtrain, being then OR >1.…”

Suitability evaluation of large‐scale farmland transfer on the Loess Plateau of Northern Shaanxi, China

“…Land suitability evaluation is often conducted to determine which type of land use is most appropriate for a particular location (Bodaghabadi, Martínez‐Casasnovas, Khakili, Masihabadi, & Gandomkar, ). The suitability evaluation for LFT is a type of land suitability analysis that allows the identification of the main limiting factors and identification of the target areas for LFT.…”