Abstract
Agriculture land suitability plays an important role in sustainable agriculture production by improving the use of current land
resources and in the identification of new land that maybe prepare for agriculture. The present research aimed to focus on the
agricultural land suitability of Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), where the existing agriculture land is only 8% and dense
forest and glaciers are covering 46.06% of the total area. Based on the literature review and local expert’s knowledge, eight
different criteria have been taken to scale the available land for the suitability of agriculture practices. These parameters are
soil orders, soil pH, Land-use Land-cover (LULC), slope, elevation, temperature, precipitation, and Potential
Evapotranspiration (PET). Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) technique in integration with Geographical Information
System (GIS) and Weighted Overlay Analysis (WOA) had been incorporated to classify the land for agriculture production.
In AHP, weights were determined with the use of pairwise comparison matrix based on expert opinions. According to the
guidelines of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the land suitability map was divided into five
zones. After subtracting the areas of permanent features like mountains, forest, and glaciers, it was estimated that a highly
suitable area was 13.21%, moderately suitable area was 11.61%, marginally suitable area was 13.14% and 62.05% was not
suitable permanently. It is concluded that the integration of GIS and AHP in land suitability, is efficient and it will help the
policymakers to improve the management of their land resources
Iqbal Hassan, Muhammad Asif Javed, Muhammad Asif, Muhammad Luqman, Sajid Rashid Ahmad, Adeel Ahmad, Shoaib Akhtar, Basharat Hussain. (2020) WEIGHTED OVERLAY BASED LAND SUITABILITY ANALYSIS OF AGRICULTURE LAND IN AZAD JAMMU AND KASHMIR USING GIS AND AHP, Pakistan Journal of Agricultural Sciences, Volume 57, Issue 6.
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