Site suitability analysis of parks in Iskandar Malaysia using GIS and analytical hierarchy process

Abstract

The development activities are primarily for the economical purposes for Malaysia. Therefore the developments keep growing year by year rapidly to achieve the vision. As the urbanization is taking place, more people will be needed to accomplish the development and this will lead to increasing of population, transportation and industrial activities. Different problems also occur such as immethodical increase of population, physical extension of cities causelessly as well as increasing in social and environmental pollutions. Environmental problems occurs as increasing population, transportation and industrial activities will release much greenhouse gases and this will make that particular area warm and high in CO2 concentration. These all possible impacts will make things worse and will bring the negative impacts to the society related. To overcome this environmental problem, Low Carbon Society (LCS) is the best way to be initiated. The usage of hybrid car, low carbon bulb and low carbon building materials is some of the applications to reduce the CO2 concentration in the city. In this study, the focus will be low carbon cities in the aspect of urban park as a way to reduce carbon as the trees will be planted to consume carbon. Therefore to balance and overcome these problems, urban green space or urban park can be created for both purposes of aesthetic and recreation role. The community in urban parks will act as preserving and balancing the urban environment as well as regulating pollution air. The objectives of this study are to conduct site suitability analysis in Iskandar Malaysia (IM) to find suitable location for urban park development and proposing tree species suitable for parks. The result of this study display the site suitability maps produced by using the integration method of Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Geographic Information System (GIS) for six different types of parks that were suitable to be developed in IM and list of tree species that can be considered to add in Malaysia’s parks based on their carbon storage and sequestration level. For this study, tree species that can help to increase carbon sequestration in parks are ix pterocarpus indicus, tabebuia rosea, syzygium grande, peltophorum pterocarpum, khaya senegalensis and fagraea fragrans as the trees can store a really high carbon from the atmosphere as they record 1,601, 1,308, 1,012, 905, 746, and 639 tonne C respectively. On the other hand, the tree species that is suitable to be planted in roadsides are Samanea saman, Khaya senegalensis, Pterocarpus indicus, Peltophorum pterocarpum, Swietenia macrophylla, Syzygium grande, Tabubuia rosea, Khaya grandifoliola, Terminalia catappa, Cinnamomum iners, Arfeuillea arborescens and Mangifera indica. These tree species store tremendous amount of carbon with the records of 31,270, 12,127, 12,032, 10,266, 7,628, 7,541, 3,692, 2,940, 2,009, 1,948, 1,450 and 1,237 tonne C respectively.