AHP: A Technique for Decision Making at Watershed Level

Nowadays, watersheds are considered as a suitable unit of planning particularly in natural resources management. In watershed management; selection of the best alternative is the most important step. In order to do so, decision making is based on different factors such as climate, geology, hydrology, geomorphology, socio economic issues and vegetation cover. Therefore, planners normally resort to multi criteria decision making. This study uses Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) method and for decision making in watershed and therefore some concepts of decision making were considered such as planning and decision making framework, multi criteria decision analysis, categorizing of multi criteria decision, spatial multi criteria decision making framework and multi criteria decision making methods. The results showed that AHP is a suitable method to compare alternatives and criteria and to choose the optimum alternative regarding the effective characteristics and suitable frameworks in order to make the team work is happening. AHP is identified as a good device for decision making to choose the best plan and for watershed management because of its flexibility, inexpensive cost and quick access to result.