The main purpose of this study is to identify suitable potential areas for agricultural activities in the semi-arid terrestrial ecosystem in the Central Anatolia Region. MCDA was performed in fuzzy environment integrated with GIS techniques and different geostatistical interpolation models, which was chosen as the basis for the present study. A total of nine criteria were used, as four terrain properties and five soil features to identify potential sites suitable for agriculture lands in Central Anatolia which covers approximately 195,012.7 km2. In order to assign weighting value for each criterion, FAHP approach was used to make sufficiently sensitive levels of importance of the criteria. DEM with 10 m pixel resolution used to determine the height and slope characteristics, digital geology and soil maps, CORINE land use/land cover, long-term meteorological data, and 4517 soil samples taken from the study area were used. It was identified that approximately 30.7% of the total area (59,921.8 ha) is very suitable and suitable for potential agriculture activities on S1 and S2 levels, 42.7% of the area is not suitable for agricultural uses, and only 27% of the area is marginally suitable for agricultural activities. Besides, it was identified that 34.8% of the area is slightly suitable.
Background and Objective
The COVID-19 pandemic results in an intense flow of patients to hospitals especially to the intensive care units (ICUs) to be treated. The ICUs will therefore be confronted with a massive influx of patients (e.g. Spain and Italy). However, if the number of patients is higher than the resources available in ICUs, rationing decisions such as determining and evaluating the criteria for ICU admission becomes essential. In this case, the decision of which patients will be admitted to the ICUs may put significant pressure on healthcare personnel. The goal of this paper is to determine the criteria to be used in the decision of admission of COVID-19 patients to the ICUs.
Methods
A three-step methodology is applied. In the first step, the evaluation criteria are determined, and then the criteria are prioritized using a fuzzy analytical hierarchy process in an uncertain and multiple-criteria environment choice. Finally, COVID-19 patients are ranked using the Multi-Objective Optimization Method by Ratio Analysis to find out which patient is more urgent.
Results
According to experts’ evaluation of ICU admission criteria, “increment of >2 in SOFA score” seems the most dominant factor among others. The proposed methodology is tested on 10 anonymous COVID-19 positive patients being treated in a public hospital and the ICU admission results are discussed.
Conclusions
Obtained priorities and ranking is in line with the hospitals’ behavior that potentially depicts the usefulness and validity of the proposed approach.
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