Land suitability procedure for sustainable citrus planning using the application of the analytical network process approach and GIS

Land use planning and ecological land evaluation are considered the most important tools and factors of sustainable development. Two aspects are of importance, firstly the potential suitability of the land for a specific use and the secondly management practices that integrate various factors such as agro-ecological aptitude, environmental impact, hydro-climate conditions and socioeconomic constraints. The aim of this paper is to identify the variety of interactions, dependencies and feedback between higher and lower level factors, and the impact of these interacting factors on sustainable citrus production. This new framework incorporates three-discipline criteria: socioeconomic status, topography and hydro-climate. In this proposed multi-criteria model, the Analytic Network Process (ANP) enabled us to consider interdepen-dency among the 14 different criteria. Based on experts' opinion weights were assigned to each of these 14 different criteria and using the ANP and GIS–MCDM, potential areas based on the most important, or limiting factors were determined. The results of this land suitability procedure (LSP) indicate a number of critical factors, which would help managers to achieve optimum crop yield and decrease the loss of citrus production. According to experts' opinion, higher weights were assigned to minimum temperature and altitude than to all other criteria. The results also demonstrate that climate conditions, and topography play a major role in potential citrus expansion. Suitable regions (free risk areas) for citrus production were identified based on major environmental factors and an optimum suitability map was obtained by overlaying 14 GIS layers. This map will be of value for future citrus planning decisions; and could lead to reduction in citrus investment and expansion into high-risk areas.