A physical land suitability evaluation model for traditional grape varieties in South Italy: a case study for “Mantonico” grape

Physical land suitability evaluation is crucial to rural spatial planning, as it directly contributes to designing successful and sustainable interventions. This paper deals with a physical land suitability evaluation model for Mantonico, a historical and traditional grape variety of the south of Calabria (Italy), which is showing a considerable decline in its cultivation, owing to the abandonment of this cultivar in favour of others that are certainly more quantitatively productive, yet less valuable from a traditional and cultural point of view. The developed evaluation model was based on consolidated MCE (Multi-Criteria Evaluation) procedures integrated with GIS tools and showed that the choice of the factors, which describe the physical land suitability for a niche product, is important and delicate. In fact, it is not always easy to establish how territorial characteristics may influence the development of the cultivation of an agricultural product. In this paper, the choice and, above all, the values associated to the factors, adequately represented real conditions and, as a consequence, the results of the model showed a clear coherence between suitability gradients and lands with similar cultivations.