Mojtaba Ghadimi

Protected areas are basically established to protect biodiversity and zoning is one the approaches to achieve this aim.

Zoning is a process through which conflicts between different land use applications can be reduced and damages to areas decreased or delayed. This will provide the time needed for necessary management actions to be taken.   Qurkhod Protected Area which was chosen for the current study with a total area of 43000 hectares is located in the Northern Khorasan Province. For zoning this area, Multicriteria Evaluation (MCE) based on an Analytic hierarchy process (AHP) was used for weighting criteria and the Weighted Linear Combination (WLC) method used for combining the layers. AHP method includes several steps.: 1- Creating a hierarchy structure for each zone 2- Comparing pairs of criteria of each zone 3- Calculating the weight of structural components and options for each zone 4- Calculating adaptation index for each zone.

The results showed that the AHP can be used to determine the relative importance of all factors and the relative importance of selected areas in relation to each factor. Maps of the various factors in each zone was produced and after multiplying each factor to its weight, a final map of each zone was obtained, using WLC method. Map of each zone includes values between 0 and 255 wich represent the lowest and highest suitability respectively. In order to overlay maps and produce the final zoning map, Weighted Ovelay command was used and the resulted map after adjustment, was converted to the zoning map of Qorkhod Protected Area. This map consist of six zones including Strict Nature Reserve, Protected Zone, Extensive Recreation Zone, Intensive Recreation Zone, Historical - Cultural Zone, Restoration Zone which cover 7000, 26030, 3360, 4531, 144 and 1918 hectare of the area respectively and equal to 16, 61, 7.7, 10.5, 0.3   and 4.5 percent of the total area of Qurkhod Protected Area. The result of the current study and similar studies may theoretically resolve many problems of protected areas but they need to be practical to be efficient in protecting ecological resources.

Keywords: zoning, Geographic Information System, Protected Area, Analytic Hierarchy Process, land use planning, Weighted Linear Combination