ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Degradation Mitigation Management
of Recreational Watersheds by Selecting the Most
Suitable Action Plan Based on Multi-Criteria
Decision-Making Methods
Mir Masoud Kheirkhah Zarkesh1, Esmaeel Sharifi2, Nahid Almasi1
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1Department of Environment and Energy, Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran
2Soil Conservation and Watershed Management Research Institute, Tehran, Iran
Pol. J. Environ. Stud. 2012;21(5):1481-1487
KEYWORDS
ABSTRACT
Watersheds have been the foundation of all human activities for ages. There always has been a sustainable
equilibrium among the ecosystem components in nature. Such a sustainable equilibrium can be disturbed
by human manipulation. Tourism is included among the potential land uses established in a watershed. Any
kind of recreational use without regard for environmental considerations will be followed by extensive damage
to watersheds. The current study aims at presenting the most suitable action plan to mitigate degradation
caused by unplanned recreational use. Accordingly, a region of 7,181 ha located on the Dohezar Watershed
was selected as a case study. The criteria, including planning, legislation, structural features, and supportive
factors, were recognized as the most important action plans for achieving sustainability in the watershed.
Factors consisting of elevation, erosion, distance from surface water, pedology, land cover density, and distance
from the fault were known to be the most important characteristics of the area affecting the selection of
the action plans in the third level. Finally, five map layers including physical design, carrying capacity, evaluation
standards and regulations, local organization, and evaluation and basic data guide the model toward successful
degradation mitigation management. The Hierarchical Additive Weighting (HAW) method, a compensatory
method of the multi-criteria decision-making model, was used to weight the action plans situated in
the fourth level. By integrating the weighted matrices, the legislation plan (with the highest preference vector
weight of 37.6%) was selected as the most suitable action plan to mitigate degradation in the study area.