Identification of Suitable Areas for Ecotourism Development by Using Analytic Network Process, Case Study: Khorram-Abad County

Ecotourism is a purpose-built journey to nature for recognition of natural and cultural history of environment without changing and destruction of ecosystems and environment; and creation of economical activities which leads to proper utilization of environmental resources and job creation for local societies. Evaluating the capacity of Khorram-Abad county for ecotourism is essential for achieving sustainable development in the region. For evaluation of ecotourism capability  of the region, by using the Analytic Network Process (ANP) and geographic information system (GIS), firstly, according to the conditions of the study area and experts knowledge,  five clusters including climate, morphologic, geo-pedometery, environmental and socio- economy were considered that any cluster has many sub-criteria. The relations between these clusters and sub-criteria were determined. For determining the relations among these clusters and sub-criteria, a number of questionnaires distributed among the experts and used to obtain their judgments about the relative importance of each criterion in ecotourism capability. At the next step, based on the limited super matrixes, the final weight of nodes was calculated. The weights of nodes in evaluating process were extracted by calculating the geometric mean of the questionnaire weights as well. After determining the weights of nodes, they were transformed to data layers. Finally, capability map for ecotourism was provided using WLC (Weight Linear Combination) technique in GIS. The results showed that 7.65 and 32.93 percentages of the study area have excellent and good conditions respectively and 6.85 percentages of the study area doesn't have any ecotourism capability