Land evaluation procedure given by FAO for soil site suitability for various land utilization types has been used to assess the land suitability for major crops in Sohag Governorate, Egypt. The database on soil, land use/land cover was generated from data derived from Landsat ETM+ remote sensing satellite and soil survey to perform an integrated analysis in the geographic information system environment. Agricultural and non-agricultural lands were delineated using the Decision Tree Classifier (DTC) and non-agricultural areas were masked out for removal from the analysis. Different soil chemical parameters and physical parameters were evaluated for different crops. Subsequently, all of them were integrated using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) model and GIS to generate the land suitability maps for major crops. Results indicated that the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) model was found to be a useful method to determine the weights. It can deal with inconsistent judgments and provides a measure of the inconsistency of the judgment of the respondents. The GIS is found to be a technique that provides greater flexibility and accuracy for handling digital spatial data. The combination of the AHP method with GIS in our experiment proves it is a powerful combination to apply for land-use suitability analysis.
