ABSTRACT
700Land evaluation (LE) is the assessment of the suitability of land for man’s use in agriculture, forestry, engineering, hydrology, regional planning, recreation, etc. Land suitability evaluation is an approach in LE that concerns the appraisal and grouping of specific areas of land in terms of their suitability for defined uses. The present investigation was undertaken to evaluate selected soils of Akola district for rainfed cotton. Nine soil profiles, representative of these areas were identified for the present study. Identification of minimum datasets (MDS) of land parameters governing cotton yield was done using expert system and available literature keeping in view the importance that they exert on crop production. Various parameters identified were, rainfall, depth, clay and exchangeable sodium percent (ESP). A number of methods are used for LE. A fuzzy modeling-based method has been applied in the present study. The method based on fuzzy modeling gives additional information on the “position” of a land unit within the suitability class relative to the neighboring suitability class and hence overcomes the limitation of abrupt class boundary of conventional method. The soil suitability classes were computed for each pedon based on the four soil attributes. The suitability classes for the crop were identified by placing the composite land index (CLI) values (of the land units) in a set of equally-spaced classes on a 0–100 scale, with a 10 unit gradation. Pedons 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, belong to class I, whereas, the CLI was observed to be the highest in P1 (92.96) and the lowest observed in P6 (90.60). Pedons 2, 4 and 9 belong to class II, the highest CLI was found in P9 (86.08) and the lowest CLI was found in P4 (85.50). Pedon 8 belongs under class III, which has the lowest CLI of 79.73.
