Ecotourism site selection of Kiamaky wildlife refuge using multicriteria decision making

Subject Areas : Geospatial systems development

Omid Rafieyan ¹ , Seyed Ali AKbar Mirrazi ² , Najibeh Abdolalipour ³ , Elham Golabi ⁴

1 - Assis. Prof. Department of Environmental, College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Islamic Azad University Tabriz Branch
2 - MSc. Executive Provincial Organization for Environmental Conservation of East Azarbayjan
3 - BSc. Graduated of Environmental, College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Islamic Azad University Tabriz Branch
4 - BSc. Graduated of Environmental, College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Islamic Azad University Tabriz Branch

Received: 2014-02-17 Accepted : 2014-05-22 Published : 2014-12-22

Keywords:

Abstract :

Identifying and locating suitable areas for eco-tourism development, is one of the important issues of tourism planners. But the wide variety of options and parameters, variables uncertainty and long terms in environmental planning, causes the          decision-making becomes more complex. So multi-criteria decision-making methods can meet these challenges. Thus the aim of this study is to identify suitable areas for         eco-tourism in Kiamaky wildlife refuge using MCDM method Based on fuzzy logic in GIS. According to the effective criteria on the eco-tourism in this area; obtained from previous research and expert opinions, 15 criteria maps (climate, lithology, height from sea level, slope, aspect, land use and distance maps from residential area, road, river, police station, environmental guard station, sensitive habitats, shrine, spring and waterfall) are produced and classified as input. To determine the weights of criteria, opinions of experts in the form of Delphi Method were applied. The criteria matrix formed and the relative importance of all criteria was defined using the AHP method and pairwise comparison. Finally eco-tourism appropriate priority map was produced using Weighted Linear Combination (WLC) method and applying the index of the importance of each criterion to corresponding classified map. According to mentioned map, 15% and 34% of the area eligible for perfect and good for eco-tourism respectively, and 4% of the area are medium for this purpose. In this study, besides confirming previous studies, power and usefulness of GIS in locating and combining different ecological criteria were shown.