Geospatial Technology in Land Resource Planning and Management : Multi-Criteria Decision Support System

'Land' plays multidimensional role in maintaining many global processes, therefore sustainable planning and management of land resources is an important issue at the global forum. The process of land resource planning and associated decision-making invariably involves multiple objectives, multiple criteria and multiple social interests and preferences. Such complexity necessitates a systematic approach to the decision-making process to accommodate the multiplicity and multi dimensionality of the problem to improve the reason ability of decisions and to justify the actions to be taken. Application of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) is widely spread in resource inventory and mapping, however, the potential of GIS for planning and decision-making couldn't be utilized fully due to it's Limited ability to represent judgments, values, arguments and opinions of the decision makers. Integrating GIS and Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) methods can overcome these limitations.