Implementation of Agricultural Ecological Capability Model Using Integrated Approach of PROMETHEE II and Fuzzy-AHP in GIS Environment (Case Study: Marvdasht county)

Unsuitable exploitation of land is the most important problem of land resources utilization in the country. Unsuitable pattern of land use together with severe land use changes cause different environmental crisis including: environmental pollution and deterioration, expanding desertification, soil erosion, natural resources depletion, reduction of biological diversity and reduction in potential of land capability. These problems significantly influence the production of resources needed for recent and future generation and prevent sustainable development of the country. In other words, it can be concluded that the reduction of excess resources, is the result of unreasonable using of land by human. Land use planning is a science that determines the type of land use through studying the ecological character of the land as well as its socio-economic structure. Assessment of ecological capability, as the core of environmental studies provides an appropriate context for environmental planning. To this purpose, the agricultural and rangeland ecological capability assessment was performed using the PROMETHEE II and Fuzzy-AHP (Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Processes) methods in combination with GIS. The Fuzzy-AHP method was used to quantify the subjective judgments of the evaluators as the weights of the criteria whereas the PROMETHEE method was employed to prioritize the alternatives based on the weights obtained from the Fuzzy-AHP. The proposed PROMETHEE method can be useful for environmentalists in ecological capability assessment and other site selection issues.