Classification of Protected Forest Areas for Road Network Planning (Case Study: Arasbaran Area)

The road network is an important element for sustainable forest ecosystem management. On the other hand, efficiency and quality of road design can be improved by considering of environmental and technical principles. Therefore, this study was performed to determine the capability of Arasbaran protected area for road passing and communication routes in order to use in the area management. For this purpose, criteria of the slope, aspect, height, soil texture, lithology, erosion susceptibility, vegetation density, distance to stream, and distance to existing road as the effective criteria for road design were identified by literature review, and their prepared maps were standardized with the fuzzy logic method. Then, the criteria were weighted using of analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and finally were combined to prepare suitability map for road planning by weighted linear combination (WLC) method. According to results, the highest weight (0.289) and the lowest weight (0.033) were belonged to slope and height criterion, respectively. Finally, the area was classified into four classes with the capability of low, medium, high and very high for road network passing, that region with medium passing capability has the highest percent (49.83%). The study proved GIS and AHP capabilities considering to economic and environmental problems for developing the road capability map in order to use for road locating in Arasbaran area.