Zoning Ecotourism Potential for area of urban influence with Integration of Multi-Criteria Decision Making TOPSIS Method and GIS

Abstract
One of the important and new dimensions in sustainable development tourism is ecotourism that have root in sustainable development theory and has formed in front of mass tourism that has environmental undesirable affect and become beyond of natural based tourism. Thus, it could not be called ecotourism the trip and travel in nature, without attention to sustainable development attributes. Because, ecotourism have a deep and strong relation with environment protect. On this basis, determine the accurate spatial extent and location potential of ecotourism, is the one of most important stages in ecotourism planning and management that with considering to ecological index of ecotourism is possible. This issue, especially in geographical territories such as Tehran province, that have a high supply and demand in ecotourism, is necessary. So, the purpose of this study is using of multi criteria decision making analysis, TOPSIS in arc GIS space, to zoning and prioritization the ecotourism potential of Tehran province territory. To achieve this goal, used of descriptive and analytical methodology, based on documents and library studies and combined multi-criteria analysis of spatial data. The result of study in the case study region, indicate that there are 5 main zoon in relate to ecotourism potential that high score areas are adopted with protected region and the main area with potential for ecotourism is located in the northern of Tehran province, among folds of Alborz.