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Land suitability analysis is a prerequisite for successful aquaculture, and site selection affects both the success and sustainability of any aquaculture development. There is an urgent need for appropriate methodology to assist planners for site selection in aquaculture development. Site selection can be viewed as a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem. The analytical hierarchy process (AHP) is a proven, effective method used to solve problem of site selection. This paper applied geographic information systems (GIS), the AHP method, and MCDM to identify areas that are suitable for shrimp aquaculture development in coastal area of Hormozgan, Iran. To create models, combination of layers was carried out through Boolean operators and weighted linear combination (WLC) method. After performing the combination models, the results are presented and compared. Evaluation of the results shows that the most of the areas classified suitable in WLC model coincide with the existing shrimp farms and this indicates the validity of the GIS-based WLC model. The areas with the highest priorities are situated in eastern part of the study area. Since existing shrimp farms cover a small extent in the study area, further expansion of shrimp farming to other areas is possible.
