The adoption of appropriate managerial approaches mainly depends upon propermonitoring and consequent assessment of ecosystems health. Towards that, thewatershed health monitoring has gained recognition among regulating agenciessuch as Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). However, its importance has notbeen considerably taken into account by authorities in developing countries wherethe outcome of such approach is essentially needed for effective and efficientmanagement of the ever-degrading ecosystems. To this end, the present articleintroduces a simple and standardized approach of describing the overall watershedhealth situation using risk based RelResVul framework. Towards this, threeindicators of reliability (Rel), resilience (Res) and vulnerability (Vul) have beenconceptualized and calculated based on the normalized difference vegetation index(NDVI) for the Shazand Watershed, Markazi Province, Iran, as a case study. NDVIis an important and commonly used vegetation index in research on globalenvironmental change. The primary data collected to create NDVI maps was multispectralsatellite images of path 165 and rows of 36 and 37, with a spatialresolution 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 ShazandWatershed health in terms of Rel, Res and Vul was healthy, un-healthy andmoderately healthy, respectively with scores of 0.82, 0.17 and 0.50 out of 1.0. Theaverage watershed health index based on RelResVul framework was also obtained0.34 varying from 0.04 to 0.46. Hence, it can be concluded that the ShazandWatershed was in relatively un-healthy state from view of vegetation cover. Themaintenance and recovery of the Shazand Watershed health should be consideredas fundamental step to reach the integrated watershed management objectives.
Geospatial methods for aquatic conservation: Topeka shiner restoration site selection and the development of an Iowa watershed health assessment
