Comparing the Performance of Raster-Based TOPSIS and MOLA Methods in Land Use Planning Case Study: Hable-Rood Basin

Environmental crises of today caused by the irrational use and land conversion, have made ecological evaluation and land use planning ever more essential. Different methods are used in land evaluation and land use planning. Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) and Multi-Objective Land Allocation (MOLA) are two of the multi-criteria evaluation and land use planning techniques. In this paper, TOPSIS and MOLA were used in raster based land use planning in Hable-Rood Basin. Ecological, economic and social evaluation maps were used as criteria and aquaculture, gardening, town and rural development and rangeland management were considered as the alternatives of land uses. Entropy method was used for weighting evaluation maps and then TOPSIS was employed to prioritize land uses in the study area. Both entropy and TOPSIS were implemented in raster format through Idrisi software and for comparison, the MOLA module was used in Idrisi software. The results of the two methods were compared and analyzed. Also, to examine the spatial pattern of the resulting land use maps, landscape metrics were calculated using FRAGSTATS software. The results showed that spatial patterns of the TOPSIS and MOLA are different with an overlap of 57.41 percent. Analysis of landscape metrics showed that spatially land uses are compacted in TOPSIS, while in MOLA they are dispersed in some areas. Both methods have their advantages and disadvantages. An important issue in current land use planning practices is enhancement of these methods for which we suggested a combination of the results obtained through the two methods.