I have gone through the IDRISI Selva v17, and also IDRISI Selva 32. You just follow the Tuturials using User Manual and Data provided, you can very easy grasp the concept of Land suitability.

Thank you Canute.

I'll go through it.

Thank you Hayder.

I'll go through the tutorial on it to get an idea on how to create the model.

Please see  the latest issue of Current Science of 2014. You may get some good answer.

Thank you sir.

Will go through it.

Take a look at this article: GIS-based land-use suitability analysis: a critical overview

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305900603000801

Thank you Asimina.

There are some wonderful new tools for doing this.  But just a caution not to get so caught up in the data that you forget the theory you want to apply.  For example, you might identify several great habitat areas in the region you are analyzing, but you need to grapple with the classic "one large vs. several small areas" issue that is fundamental in the conservation biology literature.  Also, questions of corridors, edge vs. interior habitat (the latter a function of area size), crops or trees that act as barriers to movement of target species vs. ones that are permeable.  Even if you are only looking at agriculture or forestry, you have to consider minimum sizes of fields/plantation areas and length and location of haul roads.  For some applications, you might want to go back to the 50 year old ur-source for suitability analysis, Ian McHarg's Design with Nature for a general framework.  The idea of overlays and assigning suitability points to given areas has much to commend it.  I'm encountering some of these issues in trying to analyze the suitability for development of a 40 acre suburban parcel where more than 200 townhouses have been proposed. The area contains a stream floodway (and floodway fringe) and large trees.  Among the constraints are locating a long distance trail through the property and the demands of neighbors on one side for as large a vegetated buffer as possible.  Computer mapping can be helpful, but it doesn't give a single correct answer.  One has to run through various scenarios, with some constraints absolute (no building in the floodway) and others involving tradeoffs (saving big trees away from the neighbors vs. buffering the neighbors from the new building).

I strogly recommend you to read and fallow IDRISI selva tutorial you can download 15 days trial version easily also you can find some videos in tutorial. Addition, exercise on land suitability is so clear, all sample data downloaded with software together.  

Dear Mr. Krishnadas,

Great!! You have many good suggestions in this concern. Among them, the integration of multi-criteria analysis and GIS application is the most growing one.

Shortly, please read some recommended publications:

1. Basic understanding of land suitability methods:

a. A new method for site suitability analysis. Environmental Management vol. 13 no. 6 (by Kashani., 1999)

b. Review: GIS-based land-use suitability analysis: a critical overview. Progress in Planning no. 62 (by Malczewski, 2004)

2. Examples of new approaches:

a. GIS-based multi-criteria analysis for land use suitability assessment in City of Regina (Chen., 2014)

b. Introducing a New Parametric Concept for Land Suitability Assessment (Rabia and Terribile., 2013)

c. A conceptual model for assessing agricultural land suitability at a catchment level using a continuous approach in GIS (Baja, S et al., 2014)

d. Research on urban land ecological suitability evaluation based on gravity-resistance model (by Fan et al., 2011)

Etc…..

3. One of our lab contributions is: “Application of land suitability analysis and landscape ecology to urban greenspace planning in Hanoi, Vietnam” (by Duc Uy and Nakagoshi, 2008)

best regards - RaF

Assessing the suitability for a particular land-luse is rather tricky, and generally there are many different opinions about what to include in suitability. In my opinion suitability should include only the more or less fixed physical characteristics of a piece of land like slope and soil. Other dimensions like accessibility and legal constraints should still be included in the analysis but more as assessing the effect of different scenarios or planning options.

Best regards Henning

Dear Mr. Krishnadas

There is a lots of methods and tools are available in ARC GIS spatial analyst tool for suitability analysis which are based on the required parameters you can achieve best possible zones. 

regards 

Prafull Singh