An R package that evaluates land suitability for different crops production. The package is based on the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) methodology for land evaluation. Development of ALUES is inspired by similar tool for land evaluation, Land Use Suitability Evaluation Tool (LUSET). The package uses fuzzy logic approach to evaluate land suitability of a particular area based on inputs such as rainfall, temperature, topography, and soil properties. The membership functions used for fuzzy modeling are the following: Triangular, Trapezoidal and Gaussian. The methods for computing the overall suitability of a particular area are also included, and these are the Minimum, Maximum and Average. Finally, ALUES is a highly optimized library with core algorithms written in C++.
Several computer systems have been developed for agricultural land suitability assessments. Examples of these are ALES (Johnson & Cramb, 1991), LEIGIS (Kalogirou, 2002) and ALSE (Elsheikh et al., 2013). However, most of these systems are either proprietary or lacking features for land suitability assessments. It is therefore the goal of this software, ALUES, to address some of the limitations of the aforementioned software.
The package is available on CRAN, and can be installed as follows:
install.packages("ALUES")
To install the development version, run the following instead:
install.packages("devtools")
library(devtools)
install_github("alstat/ALUES")
We want to hear some feedbacks, so if you have any suggestion or issues regarding this package, please do submit it here. As for those who would want to contribute please read the CONTRIBUTING.md file.
