This paper presents an integrated geographical (‘sp atially explicit’) and multivariate approach to add ress complex planning situations for wildlife conservati on and assist decision-making. Geographic Information System (GIS) and Analytic Hierarchy Pro cess (AHP) were combined and applied to ecological and decisional variables and their assoc iati n with known occurrences of barn owls ( Tyto alba) in an area of Wales (UK). The output is presented as geographic distribution maps showing the environmental conditions that are potentially suita ble for the species and ‘heat maps’ for the benefit of decision-making process. The application of the AHP allowed a detailed understanding of how the relative importance of each variable was elicited. This is paramount to define a fully understandable framework of decision-making that can be easily rea dapted to different geographical scenarios and with different species.

The use of scientific quantitative methods to support decision making is becoming necessary in healthcare systems, especially for Health Technology Assessment (HTA), which is a particularly complex decision making processes. This paper, after introducing three case studies in which the AHP was used to elicit user needs, generalize the method employed, provides recommendations and discusses critical methodological aspects, which the authors consider crucial when applying AHP to user need elicitation studies in HTA. The users of medical devices can include patients, healthcare professionals (with very different specializations), hospital managers, politician and general public. The AHP proved to be an effective method to elicit user needs, especially if some adjustments to the hierarchy design and to the questionnaires layout are followed.