A New and Quantitative Approach to Weighting and Ecological Capability Evaluation and Comparison with the Current Method of Multi-Criteria Evaluation in Agriculture and Rangeland Uses, Sepidan County

Land-use planning is a science that specifies the optimized land-use based on ecological and socioeconomic characteristics. This study investigated ecological capability evaluation for agriculture and rangeland uses using the GIS in the Sepidan County, Fars Province. There are different methods for weighting of parameters. A proposed quantitative method was used in this research for weighting criteria and land-use evaluation compared to the current method of multi-criteria evaluation. In relation to the common method of multi-criteria evaluation, it uses weighting approach based on the Modified Analytic Hierarchy Process (M-AHP). The performance of each of the mentioned models was evaluated throughout error matrix. Results showed that the proposed method of Regional Weighting (RW) has higher accuracy than MCE (M-AHP) in estimation of the ecological potential of the study area. In overall, the results showed that the proposed method of Regional Weighting can be replaced with common methods of weighting due to simplicity, as it has no need for questionnaires, which saves time and costs.