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Environmental consideration in railway route selection with GIS - Case study: Rasht-Anzali railway in Iran  Ali A. Darvishsefat, Majid Makhdom University of Tehran, Faculty of Natural Resources, Karaj, Iran Tel: 0098 261 222 30 44 Email: makhdom@nrf.ut.ac.ir, adarvish@ut.ac.ir ahad Setoodeh University of Tehran, Faculty of Environment, Tehran, Iran Tel: 0098 21 640 66 0 50 Email: Ahad_se@consultant.com Abstract In order to minimize environmental impacts and to achieve sustainable development in route construction projects, environmental parameters must be considered. To achieve this goal, use of GIS for route selection was proposed. This research was undertaken for Rasht-Anzali railway in north of Iran as a case study. At first, environmental parameters that affect railway route selection were identified. These parameters include slope, geology, soil, landcover, rivers, roads and Cultural heritage. Data related to these parameters were gathered or in some cases produced. Slope, rivers and road map extracted from digital topographical map at the scale of 1:25000. Landcover map was produced from Landsat7 ETM+ data dated on May 2000. Rectification of satellite data was implemented using ground control points method. To achieve a better resolution, the multiespectral bands were fused with ETM-Pan. Image classification was performed using a new approach (digital and visual). Maps such as geology, soil and cultural heritage were digitized. In order to determine the relative importance of the parameters in route selection, environmental and civil expert’s views collected from a questionnaire that has been designed for this aim. These views were used in pairwise comparison method to determine weight of map layers that related to these parameters. These weighted layers overlaid and friction maps were created according to different scenarios and automatically 4 routes resulted in GIS. Analytical Hierarchy Process was used to determine optimum routes in comparison with that produced in traditional method. Results indicate that the routes, which were designed using GIS method, are more environmentally sound than traditional one and represent a significant benefit for the decision maker. According to the results of this investigation, applying GIS technology and inclusion of environmental expert’s views are recommended to minimize environmental liabilities. The main data analysis software for this study were IDRISIW 2, Expertchoice and ArcView3.2 |