Spatial sensitivity analysis of multi-criteria weights in GIS-based land suitability evaluation

  • Authors:

  • Y. Chen;J. Yu;S. Khan

  • Affiliations:

  • CSIRO Land and Water, GPO Box 1666, Canberra ACT 2601, Australia and Cooperative Research Centre for Irrigation Futures, Australia;CSIRO Land and Water, GPO Box 1666, Canberra ACT 2601, Australia and Department of Geography, Shanghai Normal University, Shanghai 200062, PR China and Key Laboratory of Geographic Information Sci ...;CSIRO Land and Water, GPO Box 1666, Canberra ACT 2601, Australia and UNESCO Division of Water Sciences, 1, rue Miollis, 75732 Paris Cedex 15, France

  • Venue:
  • Environmental Modelling & Software
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

With growing interest in extending GIS to support multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods, enhancing GIS-based MCDM with sensitivity analysis (SA) procedures is crucial to understand the model behavior and its limitations. This paper presents a novel approach of examining multi-criteria weight sensitivity of a GIS-based MCDM model. It explores the dependency of model output on the weights of input parameters, identifying criteria that are especially sensitive to weight changes and to show the impacts of changing criteria weights on the model outcomes in spatial dimension. A methodology was developed to perform simulations where the weights associated with all criteria used for suitability modelling were varied one-at-a-time (OAT) to investigate their relative impacts on the final evaluation results. A tool which incorporates the OAT method with the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) within the ArcGIS environment was implemented. It permits a range of user defined simulations to be performed to quantitatively evaluate model dynamic changes, measures the stability of results with respect to the variation of different parameter weights, and displays spatial change dynamics. A case study of irrigated cropland suitability assessment addressing the application of the new GIS-based AHP-SA tool is described. It demonstrates that the tool is spatial, simple and flexible.