A GIS-MCDA Based Model for the Suitability Evaluation of Traditional Grape Varieties: The Case-Study of ‘Mantonico’ Grape (Calabria, Italy)

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 Southern Calabria (Italy), which is showing a considerable decline in its cultivation, owing to the abandonment of this cultivar in favor of others that are certainly more quantitatively productive, yet less valuable from a traditional and cultural point of view. The evaluation model developed was based on consolidated GIS-based MCDA (Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis) procedure and showed that the choice of the criteria (factors and constraints), 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. Results were validated by comparing the real geographical distribution of the current vine growing to the suitability value obtaining a very positive feedback on the robustness of the implemented model. The comparison between current vine-growing areas and the values obtained from the model clearly shows that the current vine-growing sites of the study area fall in suitable and very suitable classes (83.8%)