Land Evaluation for Acacia (<i>Acacia mangium </i><i>× Acacia auriculiformis</i>) Plantations in the Mountainous Regions of Central Vietnam

In recent years, both scientists and local governments have been giving serious attention to land evaluation, especially in regard to the use of agricultural land. This is with the intention of increasing the sustainability of agricultural production. In Vietnam, acacia plantations play an important role in the livelihoods of farmers in mountainous regions. Therefore, identifying suitable areas for acacia plantations is an important consideration within mountainous areas. This research was conducted in Nam Dong district, Central Vietnam, using six physical soil criteria for land evaluation by the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and also the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP). The results have shown that the ranking of selected criteria in both methods was the same, but the weighting of each criterion was different. Among the six physical soil criteria, soil depth has the highest priority, followed by slope, soil organic carbon content, soil texture, soil pH, and soil type. The suitability maps for acacia plantations within the area studied have shown that 9344 ha were not suitable, and 99 ha had low suitability for acacia plantation by both methods. For the AHP approach, 928 hectares were in the range of moderate suitability, and 3080 hectares were in the high suitability class. In contrast, the FAHP method determined 905 hectares to be of the moderate suitability class and 3102 hectares to be of the high suitability class. Based on the observed acacia’s productivity and the scores of the two methods, it shows that the FAHP has a stronger correlation than the of AHP. Within the six selected criteria, the FAHP method can increase the accuracy of land evaluation results by 4.62% in comparison to the original AHP method. Therefore, the FAHP is the most suitable method for land evaluation, especially for agricultural land planning. Further studies should be integrated into more social and economic criteria for comprehensive land evaluation scenarios.