An mce-based innovative approach to evaluating ecotourism suitability using gis

Abstract

Geographic Information System (GIS) can be used in ecotourism as a decision support tool for sustainable tourism planning, impact assessment, visitor flow management, and tourism site selection. Therefore, this system has the potential to be widely applied in tourism. The purpose of the study was to explore the potential for ecotourism development using GIS in Sepidan region, placed in the southwestern part of Iran. An innovative method was proposed for adjusting effective parameters in evaluation of ecotourism. The methods used for evaluation comprised Boolean, current multi-criteria evaluation methods (weighted linear combination), and the proposed methods of geometric mean and its calibration. Results showed that an improved method using geometric mean (kappa= 0.72) was better than Boolean (kappa= 0.56) and multi-criteria evaluation (kappa= 0.59) models. The calibrated geometric mean was also the best among the different models used. It should be noted that the geometric mean method was simpler than multi-criteria evaluation and did not require the weighting process.