A Comparison of Parametric and Fuzzy Multi-Criteria Methods for Evaluating Land Suitability for Olive in Jeffara Plain of Libya

Boolean approaches to land suitability treat both the spatial units and the value ranges as clearly defined. This is to ignore the continuous nature of land properties as well as the differences and uncertainties in measurement. The objective of this paper was to compare two approaches to land suitability evaluations; Parametric and Fuzzy Multi-Criteria Methods to model the opportunities for olive production in Jeffara Plain of Libya. In this paper a number of soil and landscape criteria were identified and their weights specified as a result of discussions with local experts. The Fuzzy MCE approach was found to be better than the parametric approach. The Fuzzy MCE approaches accommodate the continuous nature of many soil properties and produce more intuitive distributions of land suitabilities value for olive. The results of Fuzzy MCE showed that the majority of the study area is highly suitable for olive production, while the results obtained from the use the parametric method showed that most of the study area is moderately suitable for olive production. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.