Abstract
To reduce the human influence on natural resources and to identify an appropriate land use, it is essential to carry out scientific land evaluations. Such kind of analysis allows identifying the main limiting factors for the agricultural production and enables decision makers to develop crop managements able to increase the land productivity. Objectives of this study were to develop a GIS based approach for land use suitability assessment which will assist land managers and land use planners to identify areas with physical constraints for a range of nominated land uses. Georeferenced soil survey data and field work observations have been integrated in a GIS based land use suitability assessment for agricultural planning in Chamarajanagar district, Karnataka, India. Also, GIS has been used to match the suitability for main crops based on the requirements of the crops and the quality and characteristics of land. Different land quality parameters, viz. soil texture, depth, erosion, slope, flooding and coarse fragments under various land units were evaluated for the crops. Subsequently all of them were integrated using a sequence of logical operations to generate land suitability and capability maps. Suitability and capability maps for each land use were developed to illustrate these suitability degrees and display the spatial representation of soils suitable for agriculture. It was also found that better land use options could be implemented in different land units as the conventional land evaluation methods suffer from limitation of spatial analysis for the suitability of various crops.