Abstract:
This work identifies the most suitable locations for growing arable crops such as
cassava, maize and yam, to enhance crop yields, ensure sustainable development and
achieve the goals of food security in Ekiti state. The requirements gathering and
development of the web-based geospatial information system will further enhance realtime
decision making for farmers and agriculture extension workers in the state. Based
on accessibility to road, access to water supply, climate, land use/land cover, slope, soil
available water capacity, pH, texture, and topsoil organic carbon content; the suitability
of the area was determined with a combined fuzzy membership, weighted overlay, and
fuzzy overlay approach in conformity with FAO guidelines. Leveraging the potentials
of the web to aid easy accessibility to crop-land suitability information is the hallmark
of this research. The suitability information was developed based on climate data
acquired from the WorldClim database, land use/land cover information obtained from
a classification process of Landsat 8 imagery acquired from the US earthexplorer.gov
data, soil data obtained from the Harmonized World Soil Database and topographic
data from the Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission (SRTM) satellite imagery. The SCP
plugin version 5.3.8 of QGIS 2.14.17 was used in the classification process, and the
ArcGIS 10.2 was utilized in the fuzzy membership, weighted overlay and fuzzy overlay
operations. The research reveals that more than 65% of Ekiti state land is highly
suitable for common arable crops. Information on land suitability was made available
on the web for easy accessibility to users based on the spatially enabled QGIS cloud
architecture.
