| According to predictions, due to population increase and income growth, demand for food will continue to rise by over 3% annually. Wheat with providing over 33% of global world foods is one of the main sources for food security and meeting the needs of increased population. Land suitability assessment (LSA) is one of the basic approaches for obtaining maximum profit while protecting environmental resources for future. In this context, the suitability of arable lands of Miyaneh County is assessed for rain-fed wheat based on the FAO model and Fuzzy-AHP-OWA technique in GIS environment. In this study, with considering regional conditions and previous scientific researches, 8 environmental parameters (depth and texture of soil, erosion, slope, elevation, rainfall, temperature and degree days), 3 economic parameters (cooperatives, distance to markets and communication lines) and a social parameter (force labor) are used for land evaluation. These parameters were aggregated in two-stage using OWA model. Resulted suitability maps based on environmental criteria and fuzzy linguistic quantifier (LQ) includes: at least one, few, some, half, many, most and all, illustrate an overall accuracy, 26.7, 61, 84.3, 57, 44 , 8, 38.5 and 22% respectively, in compared with ground truth map.The final suitability maps based on social and economical criteria present 21.5, 61.8, 88.2, 53.7, 39.6, 38 and 19.3% overall accuracy. Based on this research finding,the proposed approach based on Fuzzy-AHP-OWA has great potential to model land use suitability evaluation problem. In addition, from the used criteria climate, soil, slope, number of co-operatives, distance to markets and communication lines are most important in evaluating land suitability for rain-fed wheat |
