Ecological Evaluation for Land Use Planning Based on Multi Criteria Decision Making Model Using GIS, Case Study: Taleghan Watershed

Throughout history, human has always been relied on his environment to provide his basic needs. Defining suitable use to optimize utilization of land as well as prevention of land destruction by population increase may be a useful step to achieve the goals of sustainable development. For this manner, it is also necessary to consider the land potential. In order to fulfill the goal of sustainable development it is worth to use the capabilities of GIS to increase the speed and accuracy of the environmental assessment. In this study the capabilities of Taleghan watershed is processed to determine the utility of area. The activities which are accessed are expanding forestry applications, wide ecotourism and urban and rural use. In this research AHP as a powerful multicriteria decision making method was used.

Implementation First, all the necessary information and essential maps were collected. After that based on Makhdoom’s ecological model for Iran, all the layers of each user was evaluated. Then, using fuzzy membership functions each map was fuzzified. Fuzzification of criteria map is the best way to consider the uncertainty lies in the maps.After this step, in order to determine the weight of each criterion by AHP method, questionnaires were designed that the preference of each criterion over the other for different uses was assessed by a number of experts in this field. Implementation of AHP was done in Expert Choice software which results in determining the weight of each criterion. Next, the weights assigned to the criteria maps in ArcGIS software. Finally forbidden area for developing land-uses was added to the process. Limitation layer for forestry uses includes residential and urban lands. The output of layers integration function is a map in which all points of utility construction are expressed numerically between 0-1.

According to the results 16% of the area is appropriate for urban and rural development, 8% for the user "wide ecotourism" and 44% is perfectly suitable for forestry. Also, 70% of the area of urban development, 85% for the user "wide ecotourism" and 12% for forestry has been quite favorable.