Geo-information Technology-Based Suitability Site Selection for Temperate Fruits of Apple, Peach, and Plum in Tigray Region, Northern Ethiopia

Introduction:  Growing temperate fruits in its appropriate region is important for growers and is used as a means of improving agricultural production, helps to improve livelihood of the community and source of income. The land needs to careful and appropriate use that is vital to achieve optimum production and productivity, and to guarantee environmental sustainability for the future generation. This requires an effective and up to date land information for effective utilization, management, and for decision making purpose. All agricultural crops, needs their ecological requirements for modelling the spatiotemporal distribution of land suitability potential and for performing agricultural activities effectively and accurately. There is a problem related to proper site selection for growing temperate fruits in the Tigray region and to solve this problem GIS-based suitability site selection for growing temperate fruit trees is important for getting better production and to help in improving the livelihood of the community. Methods: To identify the ecological requirements, for growing temperate fruits considers the physical, meteorological, and landscape environmental factors. To come up with the best suitability regions, physical, meteorological, and landscape spatial layers of the study area were collected from different primary and secondary data sources and stored in a personal geodatabase with the same resolution, cell size, and projection system. After collecting the important parameters, reclassification of these factors and using their influences, overlay analysis was performed to get the potential suitability sites for apple, plum, and peach fruits, and the model result was validated using ground control points. The Results: According to the overlay-based suitability modeling approach, suitability sites of these low chilling temperate fruits were identified and mapped. Apple has a potential of 21% as suitable land and 79% as an unsuitable area of the total area of 54,573km2, peach has a potential of 17% as suitable land and 83% as unsuitable land and plum has a potential of 27% as suitable land and 73% as unsuitable land in Tigray region. Around 50 ground control points (GCP) was collected from the ground, and 80% of the ground data were fitted with the suitability sites found from the overlay analysis modeling. Conclusion: This information was used as a baseline information for different agricultural experts, stakeholders, research organizations, NGO’s and policy makers for growing of low-chilling temperate fruits and getting a good production in the region.