GIS application for land evaluation and planning of agricultural activities for Hamadan province

mahdi reyahi khoram
environmental management I.A UNIVERSITY

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     Last modified: August 2, 2004
     Presentation date: 09/13/2004 3:15 PM in FE
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abstracts
Considering that land is an important property and all economic resources as well as development activities are concentrated on it; Therefore, it is required to carry out long term and scientific land evaluation.
Land evaluation is a form of land classification, which predicates the behavior of land use systems, that is, specific land area under specific uses.
Geographical Information System (GIS) is the combination of spatially referenced data, appropriate computer hardware and software, and users competent to employ the data and technology to solve problems. GIS is typically used to store and analyse extensive information in a map-based format. Considering GIS powers for integrating georeferenced data, and the possibility of the complex analyses connected with attribute information and graphic information, GIS is the best suitable system for land evaluation.
The Province of Hamadan located in the west of Iran, covers 19493 square kilometers and is 320 kms from Tehran. Due to the low investments in industrial activity, the development of the area is built upon the improvement of agriculture, while the real land evaluation of the region is not yet studied thoroughly.
In this research, at the first step the Makhdoum's model (Makhdoum 2001) is introduced, and then Hamadan province, from agricultural point of view and capabilities of the lands to fullfill agricultural activities ,and range management is evaluated and then these capabilities are categorized in to 9 classes using Makhdoums model. In this research, we have used Geographic Information System (GIS) with a scale of 1/250000 .The software used is Arc View (version 3.2a), with the UTM projection. In this evaluation we have used eleven data layers of digital map in the model. These layers include: over-all slope, climatological condition, present erosion status, the amount of water capacity, temperature, relative humidity, the sensitive planting areas, the value of the protective plant species, precipitation, the rate of fodder/hectare, and the vegetation cover. For evaluation, we have utilized McHark method of Maps overlay (McHark 1969). The results of this research are as follow:
1 - about 31.6 percent of Hamadan province area has the slope that is steeper than 12 percent.
2- since we have used Makhdoum's model and data analyses in this model based on Systematic Analysis, therefor, different environments were showed on the map, each of which holds its own Micro ecosystem with its specific ecological potential capability.
3- following the processing of the information, the capability of the land was showed on the map in different types of land uses.
4- According to the results, the extent of wet agricultural land, dry agricultural land and the extent of the rangelands were introduced.
5- final results showed some limitations of the ecological capability of Hamadan province for agricultural activities in some areas. These limitations should be considered for improvement programs of the province.