The Prediction of Cultivated Land Suitability of Arabica coffee in Chiang Rai using Spatial Distribution Models

The objective of this research is to apply the Maximum Entropy model (Maxent) to study suitable environmental factors and to evaluate suitable areas for growing Arabica coffee in Chiang Rai. Occurrence points of coffee planting in 2024 from the Chiang Rai Provincial Agricultural Office were employed with nineteen biological climate factors, averaged over 1950–2000, constructed from monthly mean temperature (°C) and monthly precipitation (mm) data from www.worldclim.org, also slope data and soil pH values from the Land Development Department. The data was randomly divided into two parts: the former part, training set (70%), was used to construct the model, and the latter part, testing set (30%), was used to evaluate the model performance.

It had been found that the Maxent model had high area under the curve (AUC) of 0.93, indicating the model was the efficiency of the study of suitable environmental factors and the assessment of the suitable area for Arabica coffee planting. The three key environmental factors affecting the cultivation of Arabica coffee were Precipitation of Wettest Quarter (38.43%), followed by Mean Diurnal Range (24.53%) and Min Temperature of Coldest Month (5.64%). Currently, the assessment of potential areas for growing coffee in Chiang Rai found that the high potential area is 2.04% of the total area, with a probability value of greater than 0.70.  They mostly were in the highland areas of Chiang Rai. This study would be able to promote the cultivation of Arabica coffee in appropriate areas and enhance sustainable production efficiency in the future.