Abstract            Volume:13  Issue-5  Year-2025         Original Research Articles

Online ISSN : 2347 - 3215 Issues : 12 per year Publisher : Excellent Publishers Email : editorijcret@gmail.com

Tea is a crops economically important export commodity for Ethiopia that generates foreign currency when exporting its products. Predicting the physical land suitability of tea is vital to avoid a sightless expansion of tea plantations and significant to recognize the potential suitable area for tea to disseminate of tea plantations in the country. Land suitability analysis is a basic premise for allocating specific land for specific purposes. The study integrate applications of Geographic Information System, Remote Sensing, and Analytical Hierarchical Process model to assign suitability weights to criteria that affect the tea plant's growth and produce a predictive suitability map for its cultivation. Topographic, soils, climatic and land use land cover features were considered in the model as an important contributing factor for tea plant's growth. The Analytical Hierarchical Process indicated that soils texture (25.98), Slope (14.01%) Aspect (13.31%) and elevations (10.72%) was highly contributed to the land suitability evaluation than other criteria followed by land use land cover (9.85%), soil pH (9.53%). soil drainage class (5.42%), soil depth (4.3%), Temperature (4.05%) and Rain fall (2.83%) had least impact influence on tea land suitability predictions. Studies area has great potential for tea plants production. From the generated land suitability map, results showed that about 97.66% of the total area was rated suitable for tea production, of which 94.03 % was rated suitable, 1.13% was rated highly suitable and 2.51% was rated marginally suitable. The findings further showed that only 2.34% of the area was not suitable for tea plant production. Soil Texture, Slope, Elevation and aspect were the main limiting factors for growing tea in the studies area as identified in the land capability analysis. Therefore, expansion of tea plantations is recommended in the area were for investment at large scale or small farm level as soil acidity were sever problem that limited other crop productions for alternative income generation mechanism.

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