Land-Use Multicritera Evaluation Involving Carbon Sequestration Benefits Based on GIS and RS

Terrestrial ecosystems, especially forest ecosystems, can provide significant Carbon Sequestration (CS) potential. Forestry land-use suitability analysis aims at identifying the most appropriate spatial pattern for future land uses according to specific requirements, preferences, or predictors of some activities. This paper aims at inspecting the utilization of RS, carbon models and GIS technology in regional land-use evaluation involving carbon benefits through a case study at Liping County, Guizhou Province, China. It has the following objectives: (1) to provide spatially explicit quantitative simulation of forestry land uses; (2) to use a MCDM method, i.e. the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), with GIS for comprehensive evaluation of the suitability of local forestry land use statue quo in consideration of geographical, eco-environmental and socio-economic (including carbon) indicators; and (3) to compare the evaluation results from two different multi-criteria evaluation processes with and without consideration of CS benefits.