Rangeland Suitability Analysis for Livestock Production Using Gis and Multi-Criteria Evaluation, Delo Mena Woreda, Bale Zone, South East Ethiopia

Abstract

Rangeland encompasses much of the area where livestock production is the major land use, livestock is an important source of income and livelihood for the rural community and at country level contributing agricultural growth domestic product and national growth domestic product. So thorough knowledge of rangeland bio-physical characteristics is fundamental for an understanding of rangeland management problems and its importance for livestock production. Subsequently, this study aimed to analyze range land suitability for livestock production using geographyical information system and multi-criteria evalution techniques in Delo Mena woreda considering environmental and infrastructural factors such as landuse landcover, slope, rainfall, temperature soil type, access to veterinary service, and access to the market center. These factors were ranked based on their relatives’ importance and their weight of influence was computed in the pairwise comparison of the analytical heirarcy process method. landuse landcover of the study area was classified using a supervised classification method in ERDAS 2015 software. The final suitability result indicates that 2%,5% and 7% of the land is highly suitable for cattle, goat and camel respectively, wereas 55%,52% and 66% of land moderately suitable for cattle, goat and camel respectively. Moreover,26% of land marginally suitable for goat and cattle while 11% of the land for camel production. But the insignificant percent of the land of the woreda was not suitable for cattle, goat and camel production. Thus, according to this study, a large part of the study area fell under moderately suitable cattle, goat and camel production. So proper rangeland management and utilization are essential in the woreda to improve the suitability of rangeland for livestock production.