Improvement of Environmental Impact Assessment Using Mathematical Matrix (Case Study: Shandiz Tourism Area - Khorasan Razavi Province of Iran)

Planning and development of tourism projects, disregarding environmental aspects and the extent of developments can lead to irreversible negative changes in the environment. Environmental impact assessment can predict many of these negative consequences and can provide corrective measures before the project is implemented.
Matrix, if done appropriatly, can be the most common assessment method because of its simplicity, efficiency and comprehensiveness. To upgrade the impact assessment through matrix, mathematical matrix can be applied to increase the efficiency and accuracy of the original matrix.
Findings: Mathematical matrix was designed as it included magnitude, spatial extent, duration, synergy, cumulative, controversy, impacts compensation and significance in columns and 50 environmental factors in the rows. In the next step, every environmental factor was compared with the project activities and scored in the range of ±1 to ±9. Then, the final number of effects was determined using sum positive and negative effects of the significant effects. Also, the minimum, maximum and final values for positive and negative effects of the project were determined considering the weight for each group of the effects according to their significance in the range of low to high.
Mathematical matrix has more realistic and more logical results as it considers other effects of development projects in the region by cumulative criterion and synergism criterion, using the opinion of experts and decision makers by controversial criterion and considering reform and reduction operations by compensation criterion.