Recently, wetland restoration has received increased attention due to multiple and valuable environmental services
provided by wetlands. However, most studies have specifically focused on undertaking restoring strategies, such as
improving water quality, protecting biodiversity or utilizing flood, without considering the interaction among
different wetlands in a whole watershed, such as river connectivity and flow continuity. And the special effects on the
restoration performance and management implications are not fully evaluated. Thus, it is needed to evaluate potential
effects of wetland restoration activities in a watershed scale, in order to find suitable wetland restoration sites. This
paper proposes a GIS-based multi-criteria comprehensive evaluation methodology for wetland restoration suitability
evaluation, by taking upstream of the Yongdinghe River as the example. It includes three steps: criteria information
extraction, criteria value assignment and normalization, and integrated evaluation. For the first step, the stream order,
overland flow length, stream water quality, saturation index, hydric soil and land use were selected as the evaluation
criteria. In the second step, unique value was assigned to each criterion according to their potential contribution to the
restoration. And all the criteria were normalized in order to eliminate errors that may result from different dimensions.
In the final step, the weight of each criterion was calculated and the integrated criterion was deduced by using the
AHP method. The restoration suitability prioritization of the wetlands was classified into 5 levels: lowest, low,
middle, high, highest by using the histogram segmentation method. And the evaluation accuracy was verified with the
Precedence Chart Method. The statistical result shows that about 979 km2
wetlands in the overall study area has the
highest suitability for restoration, accounting for 2.18% of the total area. And most of them are located in Yangyuan
country, with an area of about 131.586 km2
. The main types of wetlands are reservoir wetland and river wetland.
They are accounting for 11.75% and 11.33% of the total area, respectively