Survey Fertility Mapping of the Maghan Area Using Global Information System (GIS) and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)

In the face of rapid growth of the population and the need for food production sectors, one of the ways to achieve this is to increase the production per unit area. In modern agriculture, the preparation of soil fertility map seems to be necessary to plan for appropriate use of fertilizers for crops. This study was conducted to prepare a distinct map for evaluating the soil fertility according to soil chemical properties in 191 soil samples of Ardabil Plain in Ardabil Province. To achieve this goal, the available N and P, K, EC, Fe, Zn, Mn and the organic matter of soil were mapped using geostatistical Kriging estimator into the Geographic Information System (GIS) by the ArcGIS software. The Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) was used for weighting the soil fertility factors as the input data. Then, a membership functions was defined for each factor by factorial scoring and the map of soil fertility was prepared and classified by using the AHP technique into the GIS program. The results showed that most of nitrogen and phosphorus with the weight of 0.293, 0.202 had the mostly infraction on the soil fertility and production. Survey map of the distribution showed that most of the factors were studied in the northern region with the low nutrients. The results also showed that 23.7 percent of cultivated land fertility maps had a poor fertility status, 28.3 percent of the land had a moderate fertility status, 25.4 percent of the land was good and the fertile land with 22.6 percent had a very good fertility status.