Combining GIS and Analytic hierarchy process for evaluating land suitability for irrigation: A case study from Serbia

Serbia is amongst the European countries with the lowest percent of irrigated land. New state strategies for agricultural development assume significant increase of the irrigated land. To begin the process, it would be very useful for the decision makers and planers to know where the most suitable land for irrigation is located and to have that information visualized. Use of GIS tools in this regard is inevitable. Nevertheless, scientific literature points out that using only spatial data and GIS in evaluating land suitability is not sufficient for analysing such a complex problem and that GIS should be combined with other assessment and evaluation tools, more specifically the multi criteria methods. Paper presents results of combining GIS and Analytic hierarchy process (AHP), popular multicriteria tool, in evaluating land suitability for irrigation in Vojvodina Province, most productive agricultural area in northern Serbia. Mali Idjos County is selected as a pilot project. Three criteria for land suitability evaluation are used: topography, soil quality and distance from the existing and future irrigation networks. Each criterion is linked to its own spatial layer. Criteria were evaluated by experts in macro that enables implementation of AHP in ArcGIS (written by Oswald Marinoni). Macro also calculates the criteria weights and assigns them to the related spatial data. Three weighted spatial layers are then combined into one, final suitability map. As a part of the further analysis, we compared the final suitability map with the map that presents areas where land owners expressed their interest for irrigation.