Developing a new model for ecological capability evaluation of irrigated lands in Firouzabad Township, Iran

Agricultural planning is a very complex task, since there are numerous goals, which should be achieved simultaneously, and various components and elements, which must be considered at the same time. The process of agricultural suitability evaluation for crop production requires specialized geo-environmental information and the expertise of a computer scientist to analyze and interpret the information. The main objective of this paper is to test a new model (based on Iranian ecological and FAO models) for ecological capability evaluation with geometric mean evaluation for better planning management of irrigated lands. Next, the proposed method was verified and compared with other well-known methods such as the Iranian ecological model with Boolean logic, arithmetic mean, and WLC. To test the models, we used the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). The test results indicated that the method revised by geometric mean evaluation (overall accuracy %=95 and Kappa coefficient =0.91) was the best among the used methods, and the arithmetic mean method (overall accuracy %=46 and Kappa coefficient =0) had the lowest accuracy. Thus, this method (Geometric mean evaluation) has high flexibility in locating agricultural lands. Overall, this study can be used as a basic method to evaluate ecological suitability for other regions with similar conditions owing to its simplicity and high precision.