Abstract
The appropriateness of agricultural land necessitates regular accurate assessment and evaluation of fertility. Land Suitability Analysis (LSA) is one of the accurate evaluations to maintain & monitoring quality of the agricultural land. It is a necessary procedure to investigate the site suitability for any agricultural purpose. This study evaluates the land quality and rice production capacity in the Sivasagar District of Assam, India. This study used a multi-criteria Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) in remote sensing & Geographic Information System (GIS) software ArcGIS to evaluate the major factors influencing rice cultivation, including soil type, water availability, and meteorological parameters. This study classifies the suitability classes into four categories as per the procedure set by the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO); highly suitable, moderately suitable, marginally suitable, and not suitable. Due to the differences among the rice crop conditioning agro-ecological parameters, only 13 km2 of lands accounting 0.81% of total lands are highly suitable for the cultivation of rice, which is primarily determined by water availability considerations, land use and land cover (LULC), and the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). With 21.66 km2 of available waterbodies, good groundwater prospects, an annual average precipitation of 185 cm to 214 cm, and a land surface temperature of 27.32°C to 32.63°C, projected production and suitability are declining due to inefficient management practices. Farmers in the study area must use more advanced strategies to gain greater accessibility to water resources, particularly those agricultural lands that are classified as moderately or marginally suitable.
Keywords: Analytical Hierarchy Process, Land Suitability Assessment, Land Surface Temperature, Land-Use and Land-Cover, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index.