A MULTIPLE CRITERIA DECISION-MAKING APPROACH TO GIS-BASED LAND SUITABILITY EVALUATION

Land suitability evaluation in a raster GIS environment is conceptuali zed as a multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem. A combinati on of MCDM techniques selected for implementing the methodology includ ed value and priority assessment techniques for scaling the interval a nd ordinal data respectively, and compromise programming (CP) to aggre gate the unidimensional evaluations. The contribution of the proposed methodology to handle problems of scaling and dependence that often af fect expert-based suitability analyses is discussed. A case-study of h abitat evaluation for the endangered Mount Graham red squirrel is pres ented. The multiple-criteria models resulting from the CP analysis of an expert's perception of the habitat preference structure of the red squirrel are compared with data of actual habitat use. The predictive power of the models is good and sensitivity analysis based on the dist ance-metric parameter p of CP reveals some interesting differences bet ween alternative strategies for data aggregation.