| Abstrakt: |
The ever-increasing population causes huge pressure on the areas already inhabited and causes a decrease in an area per capita. This fact necessitates an essential demand for evaluating and classifying the soil according to its agricultural productivity for different crops. This research aimed to evaluate lands which proposed to use in the agricultural field in the south of Al-Dabaa Corridor based on remote sensed data and GIS techniques. Moreover, the future optimum agricultural use planning will be projected based on the land assessments in the study area. Land suitability was evaluated using ALES-arid software for six crops. It was found that 74% of the study area was suitable for one fruit crop, date palm, and about 77.3% for one crop, alfalfa, and also suitable for one vegetable crop, tomato, by 77.1%. Furthermore, it was found that the study area was moderately suitable for other two crops, faba bean and maize (72.7 and 67.8%), and one fruit crop, citrus (70.1%). On the other hand, it was found that the characteristics that most affected the suitability class of fruit crops were soil salinity, soil depth, ESP, slope, and coarse texture. Finally, the study area should go under major reclamation process (removal of the excess salts and improvement of the drainage conditions) in order to obtain the highest production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
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