Identifying and locating suitable areas for eco-tourism development, is one of the important issues of tourism planners. But the wide variety of options and parameters, variables uncertainty and long terms in environmental planning, causes the decision-making becomes more complex. So multi-criteria decision-making methods can meet these challenges. Thus the aim of this study is to identify suitable areas for eco-tourism in Kiamaky wildlife refuge using MCDM method Based on fuzzy logic in GIS. According to the effective criteria on the eco-tourism in this area; obtained from previous research and expert opinions, 15 criteria maps (climate, lithology, height from sea level, slope, aspect, land use and distance maps from residential area, road, river, police station, environmental guard station, sensitive habitats, shrine, spring and waterfall) are produced and classified as input. To determine the weights of criteria, opinions of experts in the form of Delphi Method were applied. The criteria matrix formed and the relative importance of all criteria was defined using the AHP method and pairwise comparison. Finally eco-tourism appropriate priority map was produced using Weighted Linear Combination (WLC) method and applying the index of the importance of each criterion to corresponding classified map. According to mentioned map, 15% and 34% of the area eligible for perfect and good for eco-tourism respectively, and 4% of the area are medium for this purpose. In this study, besides confirming previous studies, power and usefulness of GIS in locating and combining different ecological criteria were shown.

As a major threat to biodiversity، habitat fragmentation has increased the local extinction of species due to a function of inbreeding and demographic stochastic factors. Creating or maintaining of corridors among core areas of protected areas decreases the negative impacts of fragmented habitat. This study attempts to prioritize wildlife linkage areas among current protected areas of East Azerbaijan based on the biological importance and threat-opportunity. The prioritization process was done through assembling stakeholders’ opinions. Then، for the highest priority linkage، the focal species that are sensitive to habitat loss and fragmentation were determined based on the ideas of environmental officials. The distribution maps of focal species (Persian leopard، lynx، ibex، wild sheep، and two reptile species) were modeled based on four different modelling techniques: GLM، MARS، MaxEnt، and RF using species presences. Although all of the individual models showed good overall prediction accuracy for Persian leopard and ibex; MaxEnt and RF models indicated a good discrimination ability for wild sheep and only RF for lynx. However، no models had good prediction accuracy for reptiles (Coluber and Vipera; AUC < 0. 7). Models with good discriminate accuracy are finally summarized in an ensemble forecasting approach to estimate the distribution of suitable habitats for the species of interest. To identify potential routes among the protected areas، GIS methods we used (CorridorDesigner package) to identify a biologically best corridor for each focal species to move among these protected blocks. The findings of the present study indicated that making corridors among Marakan-Kiamaky protected areas is the first priority that is followed by identification of corridors between Dizmar-Kiamaky linkage. The delineated corridors for the highest priority linkage were consistent with field observations of Tabriz environmental officials from animal movements gathered for several years.