Modeling site suitability for oil palm plantations in southern Thailand

This study developed a methodology for land evaluation, using a multi-factor evaluation in GIS. The Analytical Hierarchical Processing (AHP) and the Pairwise Comparison Method were employed for factor ranking and weighting. The Pairwise Comparison Method required experience in rating relative preferences. An experimental design approach was applied to address this requirement. Proposed models were analyzed and extensively tested against ground reference data and the overall accuracy of the method was compared with the results from a conventional method adopted by the Department of Agriculture, Thailand. The results indicated that the new method is an improvement over the previous one in terms of accuracy in the suitability ranking. It can be employed to assist in the prediction and modeling of oil palm land suitability.