Year 2018, Volume 3, Issue 3
| Year : | 2018 |
| Volume : | 3 |
| Issue : | 3 |
| Authors : | Zeinab HAZBAVI, Seyed Hamidreza SADEGHI, Mehdi GHOLAMALIFARD |
| Title : | LAND COVER BASED WATERSHED HEALTH ASSESSMENT |
| Abstract : | The adoption of appropriate managerial approaches mainly depends upon proper monitoring and consequent assessment of ecosystems health. Towards that, the watershed health monitoring has gained recognition among regulating agencies such as Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). However, its importance has not been considerably taken into account by authorities in developing countries where the outcome of such approach is essentially needed for effective and efficient management of the ever-degrading ecosystems. To this end, the present article introduces a simple and standardized approach of describing the overall watershed health situation using risk based RelResVul framework. Towards this, three indicators of reliability (Rel), resilience (Res) and vulnerability (Vul) have been conceptualized and calculated based on the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) for the Shazand Watershed, Markazi Province, Iran, as a case study. NDVI is an important and commonly used vegetation index in research on global environmental change. The primary data collected to create NDVI maps was multi-spectral satellite images of path 165 and rows of 36 and 37, with a spatial resolution of 30 m from the Landsat Satellite images for the sample year of 2014. The results of RelResVul analysis showed that the overall condition of the Shazand Watershed health in terms of Rel, Res and Vul was healthy, un-healthy and moderately healthy, respectively with scores of 0.82, 0.17 and 0.50 out of 1.0. The average watershed health index based on RelResVul framework was also obtained 0.34 varying from 0.04 to 0.46. Hence, it can be concluded that the Shazand Watershed was in relatively un-healthy state from view of vegetation cover. The maintenance and recovery of the Shazand Watershed health should be considered as fundamental step to reach the integrated watershed management objectives. |
| For citation : | Hazbavi, Z., Sadeghi, S. H., Gholamalifard, M. (2018). Land cover based watershed health assessment. AGROFOR International Journal, Volume 3. Issue No. 3. pp. 47-55. DOI: 10.7251/AGRENG1803047H |
| Keywords : | Health indicator, Land degradation, Productivity assessment, Remote sensing, Watershed best management |
| download paper | |
ISSN 2490-3434 (Printed)
ISSN 2490-3442 (Online)
ISSN 2490-3442 (Online)
For authors
For reviewers
Search
AgroSym Symposium Archive