Geographical analysis of the levels of development in rural areas of Lashtenesha district using GIS.

Development programs of a country can be successful when before planning due to the characteristics of each region and district, appropriate measures must be taken. Today, GIS as a valuable and accurate tool enjoy countless benefits in the construction planning and development of rural areas. This system has unique ability to gather, retrieve and analyze geographic data and planners using it can easier to decide With this attitude, this study seeks two

1- Providing a clear picture of conditions of villages in the studied area using GIS, 2- Analysis and determining of development rate of Lashtnesha villages according to development indicators. Therefore, to achieve these two objectives, documents and field methods have been used. At first, the studied indicators were included the natural environment, social - demographic indicators, economic indicators and structural – spatial indicators was determined and the obtained data was adjusted in the form of descriptive tables in the GIS software for each village. Then using the capabilities of this system, three levels of development for the studied villages was defined. A total of 44 villages studied in this research, 4 villages were in the first level, 19 villages in the second level and 21 villages in the third level of development. The main point in this study is that levels of development within the studied area are unbalanced and distribution of services, especially infrastructure services is not proportional with the population and various features of the villages.