The Analytic Hierarchy Process - AHP (Saaty 1980) is a multicriteria tool considered to be relevant to nearly any ecosystem management application that requires the evaluation of multiple participants or complex decision-making processes are involved (Schmoldt & Peterson 1997, Schmoldt et al. 2001, Reynolds & Hessburg 2005).
A need to consult an example of a form used to be filled by experts in a given area of knowledge in order to perform a pairwise comparison between environmental criteria that are useful to define the soil suitability of a region (e.g., soils, slope, aspect, clima,...). Two factors are compared using the rating scale which ranges from 1 to 9 with respect to their relative importance. Than we obtain the weights for each criteria that will be used in the map algebra.