Introducing a Novel Approach for Participatory Land- Use Planning Using Golestan Land- Use Planning Decision Support System

Of the current issues in land use planning (LUP) in Iran that reduce usefulness of these studies are disagreement over the results of these plans and the difficulty in repeating the process of LUP in the event of changing strategies and decisions. To solve these problems and facilitate the use of LUP schemes by the stakeholders, in this study, a novel management support system was proposed. This system that has been developed over two years, offers a dynamic LUP solution that can be implemented for all provinces. The system was developed using IDRISI software tools focusing on the multi-objective land allocation (MOLA) function and application of Cs-Sharp programming language. Its capabilities include designing new LUP scenarios, compatibility assessment of the proposed land use with the LUP scenario, graphical comparison of land uses before and after LUP, optimized site selection of land use patches under different management scenarios and display of LUP documentation for each county. In this paper, we introduce Golestan Multi-Objective Land Allocation (GMOLA) as the first applied LUP software in Iran.