Representing of a method for military potential mapping in the forest areas with emphasis AHP and GIS

The aim of current research is to site selection of military installations and determine of suitable areas of its generation in the part of dense forests at Aliabad Katool, Golestan Province using analytical hierarchy process and GIS. Due to, using of expert opinions, university masters, military experts, and literature review were selected factors such as slope percentage, slope aspect, elevation, distance form river, distance from road, distance from villages, lithology, land cover density, and distance from urban. The mentioned layers were identified as effective factors in site selection of forest areas and their maps were digitized in GIS environment. In the next step, AHP forms were created and in order to weighting and prioritizing of effective factors was send to different experts. Finally, weight of each criterion and sub-criterion was determined. The results showed that three factors including distance from urban (0.321), distance from road (0.217), and lithology (0.176) had the highest effects in military site selection, respectively. In contrast, land cover density (0.023) and slope aspect (0.017) had the lowest effects. At last, the final map of military susceptibility was prepared using AHP and GIS and classified into four classes such as low potential 9.07%), moderate (41.80%), high (30.01%), and very high (19.13%).