The primary purpose of land use suitability analysis， the major tool of environmental planning， is to analyze the spatial variation of the natural environment and its consequent opportunity and constraint to land uses. The land uses will thus be allocated rationally by utilizing resources.
efficiently，and minimizing the adverse environmental impacts effectively. Based on the preliminary findings of the merits and drawbacks of various
suitability approaches， the principles and steps of suitability analysis
are proposed，and the Linkou-Nankan area is used as a case study to demonstrate its applicability. The case study includes: (1)the establishment of opportunity and constraint criteria for suitabilty analysis; (2)the analysis of potential capability and environmental sensitive areas for taking into consideration the dependent and interacted characteristics of natural factors; and (3)suitability overlays using weighted linear combination. Analytic Hierarchy Process and matrices multiplication are used to estimate weightings and parameters of suitability criteria. The application， advantages and disadvantages of the proposed suitability analysis is discussed.