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Assessment of Potential Land Suitability for Economic Activity Using AHP and GIS Techniques in Drought Prone Gandheswari Watershed, Bankura District in West Bengal

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Geospatial Practices in Natural Resources Management

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Abstract

Land is essential component of nature for performing any type of economic activity but availability of land is limited and more or less fixed. Enormous population pressure on land is a contemporary phenomenon. So assessment of land suitability for different economic activity is a very imperative for natural resource management. The present study aims to determine suitability of land for agriculture, pasture, forestry and industry. GIS based Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) technique is used for land suitability classification. Versatile thematic components, namely soil-depth, soil-texture, river-buffer, MNDWI (Modified Normalized Differentiate Water Index), NDVI (Normalized Differential Vegetation Index), Groundwater, rainfall, landuse and landcover, curvature, slope and elevation are integrated in a GIS environment. It was produced based on weighted overly by using AHP technique. Land suitability of drought prone Gandheswari Watershed is divided into seven land suitability Classes, namely, Class-I: Highly suitable for agriculture [84 km2], Class-II: Moderately suitable for agriculture [81 km2], Class-III: Low to Moderately suitable for agriculture [76 km2]), Class-IV: Transitional zone-I, having less agriculture, agro-forestry and pasture [57 km2], Class-V: Suitable for Agro-forestry and pastureland [51 km2], Class-VI: Transitional zone-ii [26 km2], Class-VII: Suitable for industrialization (25 km2). The land suitability map of the study area has been validated by using present landuse and landcover ground truth point. Then, the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve is prepared for validation of the methodology used in this work. The result of Area Under the Curve (AUC) is good indicating an accuracy of (0.72) 72%. The result of this Potential land suitability for economic activity can be helpful in sustainable land use and land cover development, land conservation planning and strategy formulation for management of land.

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Acknowledgements

We are thankful to the local villagers and farmers of Puruliya and Bankura district for their tremendous knowledge sharing during collecting ground-level information and opinion on this study. We would like to acknowledge the National Bureau of Soil Survey and Land Use Planning, Central Ground Water Board, India Meteorological Department and United States Geological Survey for available data.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography, Cooch Behar Panchanan Barma University, Vivekananda Rd., Cooch Behar, 736101, India

    Ujjal Senapati & Dipankar Saha

  2. Department of Geography, Cooch Behar Colleges, Cooch Behar, India

    Tapan Kumar Das

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  1. Ujjal Senapati
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  2. Dipankar Saha
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Correspondence to Ujjal Senapati .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography, Raja Narendra Lal Khan Women’s College, Midnapore, West Bengal, India

    Pravat Kumar Shit

  2. Department of Remote Sensing and GIS, Vidyasagar University, Midnapore, West Bengal, India

    Dipanwita Dutta

  3. Department of Geography, Cooch Behar College, Cooch Behar, West Bengal, India

    Tapan Kumar Das

  4. Symbiosis Institute of Geoinformatics (SIG), Symbiosis International (Deemed University), Pune, Maharashtra, India

    Sandipan Das

  5. Department of Geography, Seacom Skill University, Kolkata, West Bengal, India

    Gouri Sankar Bhunia

  6. Sustainable Landscapes and Restoration, World Resources Institute India, New Delhi, Delhi, India

    Pulakesh Das

  7. Centre for Environment, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT-Guwahati), Guwahati, Assam, India

    Satiprasad Sahoo

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Senapati, U., Saha, D., Das, T.K. (2024). Assessment of Potential Land Suitability for Economic Activity Using AHP and GIS Techniques in Drought Prone Gandheswari Watershed, Bankura District in West Bengal. In: Shit, P.K., et al. Geospatial Practices in Natural Resources Management. Environmental Science and Engineering. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38004-4_4

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