A New Spatial Model for Ecological Suitability Assessment of Irrigated Farming in Jahrom County, Iran

ABSTRACT Agricultural suitability assessment is a process that requires spatial data, geo-information tools, and the expertise of a computer scientist to analyze the information. The main objective of this paper is to propose a new model (based on Iranian ecological model and Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) model) for ecological suitability evaluation with geometric mean evaluation and calibration methods for better planning management of irrigated lands. Next, to verify and compare the proposed method with other well-known existing, methods such as, Boolean logic and MCE (WLC) models were used. For testing these models, normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) was used. Findings of this research showed that the proposed model by geo-mean and calibration (kappa=0.79) is the best among used methods. On the contrary, arithmetic mean method showed the lowest accuracy (kappa=0). So, these methods (geometric mean evaluation and calibration) have high flexibility in locating agricultural lands. Overall, this study can be used as a basic framework to evaluate ecological suitability for other regions with similar conditions because of its simplicity and high precision.