A crop-land allocation model: A case study in La Rioja, Spain

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies.

Crop land allocation is a complex process because it requires of consideration of different factors such as ecological, environmental, economical, social, and geographical factors. Crop land allocation has been run by aligning maps with predefined crop site requirements. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are playing an increasing role in rural planning because of their simplicity and speed of analysis of complex problems. They offer analysis for analyzing spatial and nonspatial attributes of a site. Hence, rural planning has adopted GIS directly, and in this project it has been implemented as the main tool for matching a particular crop to the most suitable areas. La Rioja province has diverse subdivisions of agriculture. Research has found that La Rioja lacks in rural planning, as well as in crop land allocation. Therefore, crop land allocation has been implemented to find out benefits of GIS rural planning. The crop land allocation applied in La Rioja province. The application introduced in this thesis proves that GIS has an invaluable role in the development of rural planning and it opens the door for further GIS applications in this field.