Despite the large global efforts for conserving biodiversity and ecological phenomenon, there are many activities such as land-use/cover changes, climate change, habitat fragmentation due to linear infrastructures, and other anthropogenic activities that threaten natural area and habitats. Increasing road networks makes us to protect roadless areas that have conservation values. These areas are important for maintaining biodiversity and conserving natural areas but these days are in the conflicts of conservation and development uses. In recent years, the concept roadless areas conservation has been applied at different spatial scales and in different disciplines, such as Environmental Impact Assessment and conservation planning. In this research first the landscape changes were quantified in both absence of roads and presence of roads in the western part of Isfahan (including Delijan, Mahalat, Shahrekord, Chadegan, Fereydan,Khansar, Golpayegan, Kashan, Natanz, Shanhin shahr, Meymeh, Najaf abad, Khomeini shahr and Tiran o karvan counties)that surrounding Ghamishlu national park and wildlife refuge, Muteh protected area, Dalankuh protected area and Palan gallon hunting prohibited area. The result of land scape quantifying in western part of Isfahan shows; increasing in the number of landscape degree of division and splitting index respectively19/37 % and85/13 % and decreasing the number of effective mesh size about 13/98%. These changes show increasing in landscape fragmentation and decreasing in integrity of landscape and subsequently decreasing the probability of facing tow individuals. The results also show that the landscape fragmentation is more in Ghamishlu national park and wildlife refuge and Muteh protected area that is because of Isfahan western bypass and Muteh-Golpayegan road that divided Muteh protected area into 2 separate parts. Then the key factors for determining the Environmental Value Index of Roadless Area (EVIRA) were divided into two main groups including 1) natural criteria (such as roadless areas, patch connectivities, habitat suitability, plant density, protected area adjacent and slope), and 2) anthropogenic criteria (such as road distance, mine distance and industries distance and population center distance). This research proposes an integrated use of GIS–based Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) for identifying the EVIRA. The final map was obtained by overlaying the normalized layer using WLC (weighted linear combination) method and the study area was ranked into different dir=rtl Key words : Landscape Change, Fragmentation, Road Networks, Roadless Areas, Environmental Value Index of Roadless Area.
