Digital Soil Mapping in GIS Environment for CropLand Suitability Analysis

In recent years, geocomputational technologies have emerged as useful tools in diverse range of application traditionally catered for by soil surveys. These are used to record, store, manipulate and retrieve data from many soil observations including their location and elevation on the ground. The purpose of this study is to produce a digital soil map and to develop an interactive geodatabase with cropland suitability analysis on the growth and production requirement of oil palm, cassava, and citrus in the study area. Also, to develop a choropleth map that is able to provide a visual view of all potential areas within the district study area where the selected crops can be grown. A geodatabase for crop land suitability analysis (Crop Mapper) was developed with the combination of ESRI ArcGIS and Microsoft SQL Server. The attribute data of the soils are effective depth, texture, drainage, pH, course fragments, slope, base saturation and climatic conditions such as rainfall, temperature and length of dry season. These attributes which were linked with spatial data to develop the soil geodatabase model, were considered as important criteria to determine the crop land suitability. The developed Crop Mapper has the ability to upload a soil map of the study area, perform spatial queries by attribute or using a query builder, and perfumes suitability analysis on three different soil series for three selected crops. Also, it is user friendly, fast and gives more accurate results.