The tourism industry is one of the largest industries in the world, which has become one of the largest sources of global income in the new millennium. Compared to other types of tourism, ecotourism and attracting tourists who travel to a region to see natural attractions, is possible with the least investment. Due to the increasing importance of the tourism industry, researchers have developed different solutions for its sustainable growth and development. The current research was carried out to eva‎luate land capability of Dahaghan County for ecotourism development. For this purpose, a multi-criteria eva‎luation method was used.At first, after the detailed investigation and identification of tourism indicators, indicators suitable to local conditions of the region were selected in 7 criteria and 17 sub-criteria based on the opinion of experts and the conditions of the region.Then Standardization of layers was performed using fuzzy model, Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) was used for weighting data and layers were overlaied using weighted linear combination (WLC) method in ARC GIS 10.5 and IDRISI softwares. The results showed that from the area of 143000 hectares of Dahaghan County, 15.15% have high capability, 33% have medium capability, 39.72% have weak capability and 12.12% are without capability for ecotourism development. The capability map showed that the central and southwestern parts of the region have good capability and southern parts have low capability for ecotourism development. The methods used in this study, such as fuzzy logic and linear-weighted combination are more suitable to deal with uncertainty in nature, due to their greater flexibility, and are suitable for land capability assessment.

منصوره ملكيان , علي لطفي

سعيد پورمنافي

عليرضا سفيانيان , محسن احمدي