scholarly journals Why is Lake Urmia Drying up? Prognostic Modeling With Land-Use Data and Artificial Neural Network

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Akbar Rahimi ◽  
Jürgen Breuste

Lake Urmia (LU) is considered as the largest salt water lake in Iran and has severe restrictions on water resources and becoming a salt lake increasingly. The LU drought will Couse ecological, health, social and economic problems. Land-use change and the increasing of salt areas evaluated in this work using satellite imagery. We evaluated the present situation and changes of the lake area in the past and further changes until 2025. The results indicated that from 1987 to 2000, the process of change has slowed down and less than 2% of the lake’s water area was reduced, and from 2000 to 2010, these shrinking processes were faster and more than 28% of the lake water area disappeared. The intensity of the shrinking from 2010 to 2014 is very severe. Using the Land Transformation Model, the continuation of the changes was modeled until 2025. The results of the modeling indicate the conversion of the water lake to salt lake in this period, and in the north part, the shallow waters occupy 0.7% of the total lake area. The result shows that climate change was not the significant factors for drying up of the lake but human factors such as building dams to store water for irrigation, increasing groundwater use by established deeper wells for agricultural irrigation were the important factors for drying. With changing of management of the waters leading to the lake and the transfer of new water resources to the lake between 2014 and 2016, the area of the lake increased to a double. It was evident that by proper planning and managing of water resources, the lake’s restoration can be achieved.

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (15) ◽  
pp. 6070
Author(s):  
Urtnasan Mandakh ◽  
Danzanchadav Ganbat ◽  
Bayartungalag Batsaikhan ◽  
Sainbayar Dalantai ◽  
Zolzaya Adiya ◽  
...  

Avarga Toson Lake and its surrounding area are very important for people, wildlife, and animals in Delgerkhaan Soum of Khentii Province in Eastern Mongolia. Some research has been conducted so as to explore the medical nature and characteristics of the lake and its surrounding area. However, the adverse effects of land use have neither been studied nor reported. The fact that the water catchment area is shrinking evidences clearly that findings of various real-time studies must be used effectively in the long-term by the local government and relevant authorities in order to take immediate remedial measures. Our study focused on land cover changes occurring as a result of human activities in the area, using a Landsat imageries and water indices approach to estimate the changes of land use and land cover. The aims of this study were to assess the land use and cover change that occurred between 1989 and 2018 and to define the impacting factors on the changes of water surface area in Avarga Toson Lake area, Mongolia. Findings revealed that the water surface area has decreased by 34.1% in the past 30 years. The lake water area had the weakest, positive correlation with temperature and precipitation. We did not find any indicators suggesting a relationship between lake area and climate variables. In contrast, the area was slightly correlated with socio-economic variables, such as Toson Lake area with the number of visitors (R2 = 0.89) and Burd Lake area the with number of livestocks (R2 = 0.75), respectively. Therefore, the main conclusion of this paper is that socioeconomic factors driven by land use change, policy, and institutional failure together with the existing pressure on the lake may amplify their effect of the water surface area decreasing. Additionally, even if policy adoption is relatively sufficient in the country, the public institutional capacity to implement a successful sustainable land management model regarding land access, land development, land resources protection, land market, and investments in infrastructure remains very limited.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sahand Darehshouri ◽  
Nils Michelsen ◽  
Christoph Schüth ◽  
Stephan Schulz

<p>Lake Urmia, located in the northwest of Iran, had an initial volume of about 19 km<sup>3</sup> and a surface area of 5,700 km<sup>2</sup> (Alipour, 2006). Once one of the largest hypersaline lakes in the world, this UNESCO Biosphere Reserve site currently shows a remarkable water level decline. About 70% of the lake area (Tourian et al., 2015) and more than 90% of its volume were lost between 2000 and 2014 (Schulz et al., 2020). The lack of a precise water balance of the Lake Urmia catchment is one of the challenges authorities are facing in their efforts to restore the lake to its ecological level. Here, key issues are that lake evaporation rates are mostly assumed and that evaporation of shallow groundwater from dried-up areas (up to 3,000 km<sup>2</sup>) is often ignored. The objective of this study is to obtain evaporation rate estimates for the dried-up parts of the Urmia lake bed. To this end, we set up a laboratory experiment with undisturbed soil columns collected from dried-up areas of the lake. With the help of a custom-made low-cost environmental chamber, the columns were subject to day- and night-time weather conditions typical for the area. Performed measurements comprise water level logging and monitoring of mass losses from the columns due to evaporation. First experimental results will be presented.</p><p> </p><p><strong>References </strong></p><p>Alipour, S., 2006. Hydrogeochemistry of seasonal variation of Urmia Salt Lake, Iran. Saline Systems 2, 9. doi:10.1186/1746-1448-2-9</p><p>Schulz, S., Darehshouri, S., Hassanzadeh, E., Tajrishy, M., Schüth, C., 2020. Climate change or irrigated agriculture – what drives the water level decline of Lake Urmia. Sci. Rep. 1–10. doi:10.1038/s41598-019-57150-y</p><p>Tourian, M.J., Elmi, O., Chen, Q., Devaraju, B., Roohi, S., Sneeuw, N., 2015. A spaceborne multisensor approach to monitor the desiccation of Lake Urmia in Iran. Remote Sens. Environ. 156, 349–360. doi:10.1016/j.rse.2014.10.006</p><p> </p>


2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Atefeh Ghorbanalizadeh ◽  
Hossein Akhani ◽  
Erwin Bergmeier

Author(s):  
F. Yousefian ◽  
M. Sahebi ◽  
M. Shokri ◽  
M. Moradi

Abstract. Monitoring natural resources is one of the most important tasks in earth observation and remote sensing satellites. Water resources play a crucial role in the life of human on the planet. Among the water resources, salty lakes are of particular importance in biological, physical and environmental issues. In this study, a new Salty Water Index (SWI) for Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) images is proposed based on salty lakes by particle swarm optimization (PSO), where water doesn’t combine by cloud, shadow, and salty areas. SWI is implemented on four famous and important salty lakes with the proper distribution of the whole world and different Salinity, including Lake Assal, Great Salt Lake, Eyre Lake, and Lake Urmia. The performance of SWI is compared with other water indices by overall accuracy, f-score, kappa coefficient, and standard deviation to mean ratio. Results show the efficiency of SWI on all cases due to 0.0055 Standard deviation to mean for SWI compared to 0.0395, 0.0255, 0.0873, 0.0214, 0.0524, 0.0408 and 0.0375 for NDWI, MNDWI, AWEIsh, AWEI, WRI, MOWI, and MBWI, respectively. Also, Effectiveness criteria (E) determines the efficiency of each band of Landsat 8. In this regard, results show the high performance of Green and Near IR band in all conditions and relatively proper performance of some other bands based on a special condition of each case study. The proposed method is also suggested to readers to obtain novel spectral indices of other classes and other sensors.


2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 51-54
Author(s):  
J. Fettig

Abstract The structure of public water supply in Germany and the water resources used are briefly described. An overview over the legal requirements for drinking water is given, and the sources for contaminants are outlined. Then the multiple-barrier approach is discussed with respect to the resources groundwater and spring water, lake and reservoir water, and river water. Examples for treatment schemes are given and the principle of subsurface transport of river water as a first treatment step is described.


2009 ◽  
Vol 17 (5) ◽  
pp. 1017-1022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wen-Zheng YU ◽  
Fu-Tian QU ◽  
Ying-Xiang QI ◽  
Guo-Feng YU ◽  
Jun SHI
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  

Agronomy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 101
Author(s):  
Antonio J. Mendoza-Fernández ◽  
Araceli Peña-Fernández ◽  
Luis Molina ◽  
Pedro A. Aguilera

Campo de Dalías, located in southeastern Spain, is the greatest European exponent of greenhouse agriculture. The development of this type of agriculture has led to an exponential economic development of one of the poorest areas of Spain, in a short period of time. Simultaneously, it has brought about a serious alteration of natural resources. This article will study the temporal evolution of changes in land use, and the exploitation of groundwater. Likewise, this study will delve into the technological development in greenhouses (irrigation techniques, new water resources, greenhouse structures or improvement in cultivation techniques) seeking a sustainable intensification of agriculture under plastic. This sustainable intensification also implies the conservation of existing natural areas.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (7) ◽  
pp. 466
Author(s):  
Wenbo Mo ◽  
Yunlin Zhao ◽  
Nan Yang ◽  
Zhenggang Xu ◽  
Weiping Zhao ◽  
...  

Spatial and quantitative assessments of water yield services in watershed ecosystems are necessary for water resource management and improved water ecological protection. In this study, we used the InVEST model to estimate regional water yield in the Dongjiang Lake Basin in China. Moreover, we designed six scenarios to explore the impacts of climate and land use/land cover (LULC) changes on regional water yield and quantitatively determined the dominant mechanisms of water yield services. The results are expected to provide an important theoretical reference for future spatial planning and improvements of ecological service functions at the water source site. We found that (1) under the time series analysis, the water yield changes of the Dongjiang Lake Basin showed an initial decrease followed by an increase. Spatially, water yield also decreased from the lake area to the surrounding region. (2) Climate change exerted a more significant impact on water yield changes, contributing more than 98.26% to the water yield variability in the basin. In contrast, LULC had a much smaller influence, contributing only 1.74 %. (3) The spatial distribution pattern of water yield services in the watershed was more vulnerable to LULC changes. In particular, the expansion of built-up land is expected to increase the depth of regional water yield and alter its distribution, but it also increases the risk of waterlogging. Therefore, future development in the basin must consider the protection of ecological spaces and maintain the stability of the regional water yield function.


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