Abstract: The assessment of quality of the forest tourism resources has been extensively researched in China since recent years. The forest tourism resources should be extensively investigated and synthetically assessed, the methods and standards should be unified, and the objectivity and the rationality should be ensured so as to protect the forest landscapes and the ecological environment, develop forest tourism, achieve a sustainable utilization of the forest tourism resources, and gradually increase the ecological benefit, social effect and economic returns of the forest resources. In this paper, a synthetic assessment system of the forest tourism resources is developed based on the references of a lot of synthetic assessment data of forest tourism resources. According to the feedback information of the experts'advisory systems, the development and calculation of a comparison judge matrix which is consisted of 23 selected variables are carried out by using analytic hierarchy process (AHP), and the weight and the important order of all the index variables in the synthetic assessment system of the forest tourism resources are quantitatively determined. The results show that the synthetic assessment system can be divided into 3 hierarchies, i. e., the purpose hierarchy including the synthetic assessment of the forest tourism resources, requirement hierarchy including the tourism resources and the development and construction conditions, and index hierarchy including the geologic and geomorphologic conditions, waters, resources of the wild vegetation and animals, cultural and historic sites, etc. According to the general ordination of the hierarchies in the synthetic assessment system of the forest tourism resources, the weight of the tourism resources in the requirement hierarchy is high, which reveals that the tourism resources are most important in the forest parks, then the development and construction conditions which may promote or restrict the development of the tourism resources. In the index hierarchy, the weights of vegetation, forest environment, geologic and geomorphologic conditions and waters are obviously higher than that of others, and these factors can be regarded as the important indexes in the synthetic assessment system of the forest tourism resources.

Key words: forest tourism resources, synthetic assessment, index system, analytic hierarchy process