Optimum using of natural resources is an important issue because of resource limitation and population growth as well as decreasing the suitable lands for agricultural activities. Inappropriate use of environmental resources during four recent decades indicates their destruction and if this continues, we will seriously face food poverty in future. So to prevent this problem we need a comprehensive land use planning in which various land uses are selected according to a specified framework in a reasonable manner considering the potential of environment. In a global scale, agriculture as a land use accounting for the highest area than other uses, causing large environmental impacts so that evaluation of farm lands is essential. In fact, the selection of agricultural land uses without consideration of land ecological potential will create environmental and socio-economic problems. The current study was conducted in framework of Iranian agriculture land use ecological model (irrigated and non-irrigated (dry farming) and range lands) to find the agriculture land use potential in Lenjan region located in Isfahan province considering multi-criteria evaluation method (MCE) including analytic network process (ANP), Bolean Logic (BL), weighted and linear combination (WLC) using various softwares including ArcGIS 9.3 Super Decision 2.1.4 and Excel 2010. Since agricultural activities in Lenjan have a great deal of importance in Isfahan province, this region was selected as the study area. The most effective ecological parameters in evaluation of land use potential including slop, climate, soil erosion, soil development and soil texture were selected. Since annual rainfall in this area is less than 400 mm, then there is only irrigated farming in the area. Mapping the criteria was done using geographical information system. Then, the weights of the layers were obtained using analytic network process considering the study purpose in which the slope and soil development had the highest values. Finally, the potential of area was evaluated through BL (without weighting) and WLC seperately. The first agriculture land use dir=ltr Keywords : Multi criteria evaluation (MCE), Agricultural land use capability, Lenjan Region, GIS, Bolean logic, Analytic network process.
