Modeling the land suitability for agricultural utility in a semi-arid region of Tirunelveli district, South India using multi-criteria and geospatial approach

The rapid increase in urbanization forced the change in land-use patterns from agriculture to impermeable residential. This phenomenon will negatively affect both direct and indirect agricultural employment opportunities and productivity. A systematic technique helps in recovering the decremental agricultural land proportion. Spatial analysis of a region is a leading scientific method for land characteristics and suitability assessment. Land suitability can assist in the creation of agricultural productivity growth strategies. Geographic Information System (GIS) is successful in multiple criterion-based decision approaches. This study considered bare land extracted by supervised classification on the collected georeferenced Landsat-8 satellite image as the study area. Organic compounds, conductivity, pH, and soil texture were the criteria for estimating the suitable regions for agricultural activities in our study area, Sivanthipatti village, Tirunelveli district. The analytical hierarchy process (AHP) helped to assign weightage for the selected criteria. The combined AHP and GIS technique includes creating an AHP hierarchy, defining evaluation criteria, conducting pairwise comparisons, and creating criterion maps and land suitability analysis maps. The criterion weightage determined from AHP for pH, organic carbon content, salinity, and soil texture is 54.86%, 28.05%, 11.51%, and 5.58%, respectively. This analysis estimated that around 1750 acres of land are readily suitable for agricultural land-use conversion from its existing bare land surface.