Determination of Optimum Environmental Conservation: Using Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Techniques

Abstract

The type and degree of conservation areas in Turkey legally dictate the kind of land uses that can and cannot take place in a conservation area. Thus, the conservation scheme is one of the most important criteria in designing an urban land-use plan. The aim of this study is to analyse the effects of various conservation decisions on land-use allocation holding everything else constant. This study uses a land-allocation mathematical programme formulated by Hanink and Cromley [(1998) Land-use allocation in the absence of complete market values, Journal of Regional Science, 38, pp. 465 -480] that integrates the geographical information systems with a generalized assignment problem to determine an optimum level of conservation scheme in Cesme/Izmir, a coastal resort in Turkey. The findings state that the proposed technique is indeed very useful and promising to answer diversified practical issues on a more rational basis.

GIS-based multi-criteria analysis of breeding habitats for recolonising species: New Zealand sea lions

“…Pixels that contain a value above a suitability threshold represent optimal locations. GIS-based MCA has been applied to a number of land use suitability mapping applications, for example in land allocation for planning (Hanink and Cromley, 1998), natural wastewater treatment (Anagnostopoulos et al, 2009), bicycle facility planning (Rybarczyk and Wu, 2010) and conservation effects on urban landuse planning (Çelik and Türk, 2011). Other biological examples include evaluation of land suitability for giant prawn farming (Macrobrachium rosenbergii -Hossain and Das, 2010), planning for biodiversity assets (Geneletti, 2008) the identification of suitable habitat for the old-forest polypore (Skeletocutis odora - Store and Kangas, 2001), or for black bear (Ursus americanus) habitat (Clevenger et al, 2002).…”

“…The knowledge elicitation procedure through pairwise comparison is followed in Hanink andCromley (1998), Clevenger et al (2002), Hossain and Das (2010) and Çelik and Türk (2011) and subsequent suitability mapping is a stage shared by all of the stated examples. Clevenger et al (2002) developed an expert-based model (using 2 experts) and a literature-based model, with the latter found to be the closest estimate to an empirical model that the authors had developed.…”

Heuristic Methods

“…Cromley and Hanink (1999) argue that the use of heuristics, such as MOLA, for tackling spatial problems is only justified if they result in near optimal solutions and if an efficient exact method cannot be developed. Consequently, they demonstrated that suitability based land use allocation analysis can be operationalized in terms of a generalized assignment problem (see also Çelik and Türk 2011;Türk and Çelik 2013) and solved using exact methods (see Chap. 5).…”