Using the best-worst method and AHP to assign land priority for date palm cultivation in Jahrom Region, Fars

Land use priority assessment is the principal basis of land use planning and management. It is a kind of decision-making with several criteria that sometimes contradict each other. This is why multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) methods have in recent years found wide applications in solving land suitability assessment problems. The objective of this study was to introduce the Best-Worst Method (BWM) and its application in determining the suitability of land for agricultural crop production. Furthermore, the results obtained were compared with those reported in previous studies that had employed the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) as the most widely used multi-criteria decision-making method. For this purpose, soil profile samples were taken from 12 orchards under date cultivation in Jahrom region, Fars Province and subjected to the necessary physicochemical analyses to identify the soil properties affecting crop yield. Once the soil and yield data matrices had been prepared, the BWM and AHP methods were used to determine the weight of each criterion. Land suitability index was subsequently obtained for each garden as the sum of the products of the standardized value of each soil property by its weight. The indices thus obtained were compared with the corresponding actual crop yield to determine the performance of the models employed. Although the results indicated almost identical index values from both methods, the evaluation criteria of minimum violation, total deviation, and conformity revealed more consistent BWM judgments. It was finally concluded that BWM could be recommended as a more reliable and efficient method for solving multi-criteria decision-making problems as required in land use management owing to its varied advantages such as the need for fewer pairwise comparisons compared to other matrix-based MCDM methods like AHP, more consistent and compatible weights ultimately derived in the decision-making problem, the possibility for its application simultaneously with other methods, the use of integers in comparisons, and ease of application.