With the goal of environmental sustainability for the resort, it was decided that the cost/preference and environmental criteria be evaluated separately in order to be able give greater importance to the environmental concerns.  A multi-criteria evaluation (MCE) with ordered weight averaging (OWA) was used for both sets of criteria.

        WEIGHT was used to help assign weights to each of the cost/preference factors, depending on their level of importance to the site location.  Core_lufuzz and tourismfuzz were determined to be the most important of the cost/preference factors due respectively to its relation to the Vancouver Island Land Use Plan and the importance of a high tourism potential for the site location.

     roadfuzz : 0.0815
unsightlyfuzz : 0.1490
      slopefuzz : 0.1638
  huntingfuzz : 0.0910
  tourismfuzz : 0.2402
  core_lufuzz : 0.2746

        Since the study area is so large, increasing the chances of finding a very suitable location, OWA was used to provide
an analysis with a low level of risk while still having some tradeoff amongst the factors.

        For the environmental criteria, the distance to endangered species factor was accorded a slightly higher weight than the distance to water factor.

endangerfuzz : 0.60
      waterfuzz : 0.40

        So that the two environmental factors did no compensate or tradeoff for each other in the analysis, I used an OWA that has a low level of risk and no tradeoff.

        Using MCE again, I combined both the cost/preference MCE analysis and the environmental MCE analysis in order to produce a final suitability map for the eco-tourism site location.  Low risk and no tradeoff was attained using OWA, and both factors were given equal weights of 0.50.

        In order to select the most suitable site from the final MCE analysis, I used RANK to order each pixel from the most suitable to the least suitable.  I used the distance from roads suitability map as a secondary sort file, so that pixels with the equal suitability would be ranked according to the roadfuzz criteria.

        Finally, since each pixel is equivalent to one square km, I used RECLASS to display only the top twenty-five possible site locations.  It turned out that the 1st, 2nd, 5th, 7th and 24th best sites were located adjacent to each other on multi-resource crown land.  They are located on an island on the West Coast of Vancouver Island near Tofino, Clayoquot Sound and Pacific Rim National Park.  Only a short boat trip would be necessary to bring the visitors to the resort, and very little if any new roads would have to be built.  The site offers the possibility for activities such as whale watching, sea kayaking and hiking through old growth rainforest and along beaches.  However,  if this location does not turn out to be suitable after further analysis both on the ground and with government, there is also a large quantity of highly suitable land located at the North end of Vancouver Island as seen on the Final MCE-OWA Location Analysis map above.

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