Zonation of areas susceptible to deforestation is very considerable by cause of accommodating natural resources planners and decision-makers to direct their conservation and regeneration activities on at-risk zones. This study aimed to identify the most influential factors in deforestation using Multi-criteria decision Making Method in a part of forests of Northern Zagros forests in Iran with a total area of 9177 hectares. By identifying the most important factors affecting deforestation, these factors were classified into three main criteria: human factors, natural factors and physiographic factors. Ten factors selected as criteria/sub-criteria were divided into human factors (population density, livestock density, distance from residential areas, distance from roads, distance from farmlands and gardens), physiographical factors (slope, aspect, evaluation) and natural factors (forest density, distance from waterways). By establishing hierarchical structure and performing pairwise comparisons, we determined the weight and importance of the main criteria and the sub-criteria. For this purpose, the opinions of each of the experts were entered separately in the Expert Choice software. After examining the inconsistency rate of the responses, the geometric mean of all responses was extracted by the software. The map of each of the following criteria was prepared using ArcGIS 10.3 software. The maps were converted into standardized scale maps using the linear scale conversion method. In the final step, with the overlapping and integration of all sub-criteria maps, the zoning map of areas susceptible to deforestation was prepared in four groups with low risk, medium risk, high risk and very high risk. According to the results, 3.25% of the territory was located in very high-risk, 55.92% in high-risk, 40.45% in moderate-risk and 0.38% in low-risk zone. Accuracy assessment was done by comparing the deforestation risk zoning map with real deforestation map of the study area. The results showed that 77.81% of the areas that has deforested in this period was located in high-risk and very high-risk zones. This amount of accuracy supported the efficiency of Multi Criteria Decision Making Methods in deforestation zoning.
