COMPARISON OF ANALYTICAL HIERARCHY PROCESS AND FUZZY METHOD IN DEFORESTATION RISK ZONING

Abstract. Detection and prediction of land-cover changes are powerful tools in natural resources management and ecosystem assessment. This study was carried out to compare multi-criteria decision techniques (AHP and fuzzy) in deforestation risk zoning. The TM images of Landsat 5 were used to produce deforestation map during 1989 to 2011. In the next step, the most important criteria affecting deforestation were determined. The final weights of criteria were computed using expert's judgments, pairwise comparisons by AHP and also linguistic terms by fuzzy technique. Weighted linear combination method was used to combining the criteria, and each of the generated maps with its special weight was integrated into the GIS environment. The final deforestation risk zoning map, in both methods of AHP and fuzzy, were classified into five classes including of very high, high, moderate, low and very low risk.

Evaluation of the results showed that 81.07 and 80.65 percentages of deforestation are located in the very high and high risk zones in the maps derived from AHP and fuzzy approaches, respectively. Based on the results, AHP and fuzzy methods have suitable performance in deforestation risk zoning. Thus, despite the different nature of the AHP and fuzzy methods, it was observed that these two methods do not have much difference in deforestation risk zoning of the study area, in practice.