Evaluation of Suitability of Some Benchmark Soils of India for Rice Cultivation using Boolean and Fuzzy Logic: A Comparative Study

Conventional method of land evaluation for determining land suitability involves the use of Boolean logic which fails to incorporate the inexact nature of most of the land resource data. The uncertainties associated with the process of mapping and laboratory analysis and the complexity of variation occur on all scales. Application of fuzzy logic to land evaluation can handle these limitations in a definable way. This paper determines land suitability of nine benchmark soils from eastern India for rice using Boolean and fuzzy logics and compares the results. The results highlight the advantages of the latter method, notwithstanding the requirement on choice of membership functions and weights which have a major effect on the results. The Boolean method has been rather limiting in that it lowers down the overall suitability class and as a result does not match well with actual crop performance.