Generation of land quality index for agricultural usage at gÜvenÇ basin, Turkey

The aim of this study is to develop the land quality index (LQI) based on expert opinion and multi-criteria decision support approaches for agricultural lands. The study was conducted on 8 soil series and 20 land units belonging to the lands of Ankara-Güvenç Basin, Turkey which covers about 17.5 km2, representing the ecological conditions of a semi-arid climate. In this research, 9 main indicators were chosen including depth, slope, stoniness, bulk density (BD), texture, electrical conductivity (EC), pH, organic matter (OM) and CaCO3. Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) method was used a pairwise comparison of indicators. As a result of the LQI assessment, while 17.14% of the lands were classified as “High” and 37.41% Moderate, the agricultural quality class of 41.55% of the studies land was determined as “Low” and “Very Low” and mapped in GIS. In this study, it was determined that the final index value of the land was affected by depth (24.2%), slope (21.1%) and bulk density (16.6%) indicators with high weight coefficients. In addition, the values of the LQI were compared with Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) values for testing and it has been determined that land quality assessment for agricultural usage has been performed with high accuracy for NDVI (r2 = 0.74%). Finally, the results of the study showed that the LQI was achieved for micro basin scale under semi-arid climate conditions.