Investigating the Promotion Possibility of No-Hunting Areas to the Protected Areas- a Case Study

Protected areas are established to conserve unique features and biodiversity of the nature. Accordingly, wherever has one of the natural, ecological and/or cultural values it should be considered a protected area. Kave-Deh No-hunting Area is located on extremely east of Tehran Province in an area of 94,961 ha. Due to rich and diverse land cover, distinctive wildlife species, and unique monuments the area was selected as a case study to examine the possibility of its promotion to the protected area using Spatial Multi Criteria Evaluation (SMCE) Method. For this purpose, the relevant criteria were identified by Delphi method. After finalization of the most important criteria by Delphi panelists, the map layers were prepared at the scale of 1:100000, in the environment of GIS Software. Afterwards, the map layers were divided into factors and constraints of which factors were standardized by S-shaped membership functions of fuzzy logic. The dimensionless factor maps were weighted using Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) Method in the environment of Expert Choice Software. Subsequently, a mathematical equation was extracted to conduct the land suitability analysis. The Weighted Linear Combination (WLC) Method was applied to overlay the map layers and obtain the final ‘nature conservation’ land use map. The final land suitability map showed that 34,687 ha of whole study area (equal to 37 %) have the potentiality for promotion to the protected area.