LAUSR

ABSTRACT This paper used eight factors to evaluate the land suitability for ecotourism of Okomu National Park (ONP), Nigeria, and Pendjari National Park (PNP), Benin. Poor ecotourism planning could cause irreversible loss of extensive vegetation areas. Therefore, ecotourism experts’ responses through analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and geographic information systems were employed to calculate the criteria evaluation weights. The AHP results showed that the maximum and minimum weights of the criteria are the land use/land cover and aspect, respectively, in ONP, while the visibility and aspect, respectively, in PNP. Large areas of ONP were classified as unsuitable, while that of PNP were classified as moderately suitable. However, the land suitability models for ecotourism will serve a dual-purpose of effective park planning and value-added game viewing. Abbreviation: LSMs: Land Suitability Models