GIS-BASED MULTICRITERIA LAND SUITABILITY EVALUATION USING ORDERED WEIGHT AVERAGING WITH FUZZY QUANTIFIER: A CASE STUDY IN SHAVUR PLAIN, IRAN

Cell-based Multicriteria Evaluation (MCE) methods are used to analyse the land suitability evaluation. Land evaluation is carried out to estimate the suitability of land for a specific use such as arable farming or irrigated agriculture. land suitability evaluation is a prerequisite for land-use planning and development (Sys 1985; Van Ranst and others 1996). It provides information on the constraints and opportunities for the use of the land and therefore guides decisions on optimal utilization of land resources (FAO1983). The aim in integrating Multicriteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) with Geographical Information Systems (GIS) is to provide more flexible and more accurate decisions to the decision makers in order to evaluate the effective factors. Furthermore, By changing the parameters in this type of method, a wide range of decision strategies or scenarios can be generated in some procedures. The goal of this research is to take the advantage of incorporation of fuzzy (linguistic) quantifiers into GIS-based land suitability analysis by ordered weighted averaging (OWA). OWA is a multicriteria evaluation procedure (or combination operator). The nature of the OWA procedure depends on some parameters, which can be specified by means of fuzzy (linguistic) quantifiers. The quantifier-guided OWA procedure is illustrated using land-use suitability analysis in Shavur plain, Iran.