Cartographic Modeling for the Suitability of Physical Characteristics on the Cultivation of Maize Crop in GIS / Erbil Plain District As A Mode

Maize is one of the world's most important food crops after wheat and rice, characterized by its high nutritional value, and also outperforms wheat by the carbohydrates it contains. Moreover, they tend to provide high productivity per unit of land, making them a major crop in ensuring food availability and enhancing consumers' food security. On the other side, maize contributes to securing animal feed and is widely used in many industrial products, such as the starch industry and Maize oil to name a few. The maize crop is grown in almost all countries of the world and has occupied an area of 1600,000 km2 in 2019 at the global level. One of the most important things that distinguishes maize from other strategic crops is that it can be consumed directly without the need to remove crusts as with other strategic crops such as wheat and barley.Therefore, the research aims to develop a new methodology for cartographic modelling in addressing the suitability of physical factors for the cultivation of maize crop in the Erbil plain, based on global standards, and thus to provide a spatial document for decision makers, which can be used in the agricultural planning process and the sustainability of agricultural land.The research has found a series of important findings. Cartographic modelling is a successful methodology for transforming numerical criteria and variables into mathematically treatable maps to shed light on the mechanics of the modeled phenomenon, thus moving the map from the illustration stage to the geographical thinking stage. Basically, cartographic modeling has also revealed that agricultural land in the Erbil plain district has a high potential for containing the cultivation of maize crop, due to the settlement of higher varieties of suitability of natural properties on its cultivation in large areas of the judiciary estimated at 37.13%.