Spatial Zoning of Agricultural Tourism Capabilities in Rural Areas of Lorestan Province

Given the heterogeneous spatial distribution of opportunities for agricultural tourism development and the close relationship between this type of tourism and spatial conditions, this study is an attempt to fill the gap of spatial and location-based analysis in agricultural tourism studies as a strategy to solve agricultural and rural challenges. For the development and sustainability of agricultural tourism opportunities, it is necessary to recognize the existing capabilities in each geographical space and villages with more capabilities. This issue is especially important for planners, decision makers and investors, considering the risk of developing tourism businesses in different space units. Therefore, in support of spatial planning of agricultural tourism activities, the present study was conducted to make spatial zoning of agricultural tourism development capabilities and rank the villages targeted for agricultural tourism in susceptible areas. In this study, spatial data including natural resources, access, preconditions for tourism development, data related to rural capacities, which can be divided into three groups of agricultural capacity, services required by tourists and tourist attractions located in the villages of the study area, have been used. Spatial analysis was performed with Fuzzy-TOPSIS hierarchical analysis model. The results show that the criteria of distance from agricultural plots and distance from historical villages are the most important and the least important among the criteria used, respectively. Also, only 35% of the total area of the study area has high potential (suitable and very suitable class) for the development of agricultural tourism. The ranking of the villages located in the very suitable class reveal that Nasrabad village with a relative distance of 0.779 is the most capable village for the development of agricultural tourism. In general, the findings indicate that the susceptible areas to agricultural tourism development are stretched from the southeast to the northeast of the study area.