Zeinab Maddahi - Department of soil science,College of Agriculture and Natural Ressources, Isfahan Islamic Azad University,Isfahan, Iran
Ahmad Jalaliyan - Department of soil science,College of Agriculture and Natural Ressources, Isfahan Islamic Azad University,Isfahan, Iran
Mir Masoud Kheirkhah Zarkesh - Department of soil science,College of Agriculture and Natural Ressources, Isfahan Islamic Azad University,Isfahan, Iran

Nowaday, the population of the planet is growing dramatically. In order to meet the increasing demand for the food the farming community has to produce more and more. Land Suitability analysis is needed for various purposes in the context of present day agriculture. The present popular methods that are followed for land suitability analysis include ranking and rating, weighted summation, requirement matching etc. Here the weights are arbitrarily chosen, and are sggregated using simple Boolean overlay methods. Although these methods are simple and strayghtforward they lack solid mathematical foundations. Ceballos - Silva and Lepoz -Blanco (2003), used matrix pair wise comparison for land suitability. This method overcomes the problem of determinig the weights. Analytical Hierarchy Process is a widely used method in decision-making. AHP is introduced by Saaty (1977), with the basic assumption that comparison of two elements is derived from their relative importance.GIS is the tool for input, storage and retrival, manipulation and analysis, and output of spatial data.

analytical hierarchy process; land suitability evaluation