Abstract
Landuse and climate change are the two main dynamics significantly affecting watershed hydrology. Adequate knowledge about how these changes will alter the hydrologic regime provides valuable information for future water resources planning and management. The current study attempts to analyze the joint consequences of these dynamics on the future hydrological response of the Gorganroud watershed in northern Iran. For landuse, the integrated Markov Chain analysis and Multi-Layer Perceptron Neural Network (MC-MLPNN) algorithm were used to obtain landuse for 2030 and 2050. For climate, we developed future scenarios based on the downscaled data from MPI-ESM-MR for 2021–2040 and 2041–2060. Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) was used to simulate watershed hydrology. We found that (1) from 1986 to 2050, agriculture and rangeland are likely to expand by 18.6% and 10.7% of the total watershed area, respectively, at the expense of forest covers. (2) Temperature and precipitation are expected to increase by 1.3 °C and 2.5 °C and by 31.7% and 27.1% for Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (RCP8.5) during 2021–2040 and 2041–2060, respectively, compared to the baseline of 1976–1995. (3) We found that the integrated landuse and climate change will likely increase annual evapotranspiration during 2021–2040 and 2041–2060 by 113.9% and 11.4%, lateral flow by 14.6% and 7%, baseflow by 166.7% and 77.2%, surface runoff by 54.2% and 41%, water yield by 50.5% and 35.9%, and streamflow by 48.6% and 32.1% for RCP8.5 compared to the baseline of 1976–1995.
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Data availability
The observed climate and hydrological data are available at the Iranian Meteorological Organization (IMO) and the Gloestan Regional Water Authority (GRWA), respectively. Furthermore, the satellite images dataset can be freely downloaded from the website of the United States Geological Survey (USGS), https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov.
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Acknowledgements
The authors warmly acknowledge the Iranian Meteorological Organization (IMO), the Iranian Ministry of Agriculture (IMA), the Gloestan Regional Water Authority (GRWA), the World Climate Research Programme’s Working Group on Coupled Modelling, and the United States Geological Survey (USGS) for providing required data. The authors also gratefully appreciate anonymous reviewers who made very important comments to improve the quality of this study.
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All authors contributed to this study. Data collection, data analysis, hydrological modeling, making graphs and figures were performed by Mohammad Sadegh Norouzi Nazar. The original draft of the manuscript was written by Dr. Yousef Sakieh and Mohammad Sadegh Norouzi Nazar. Dr. Zahra Asadolahi and Dr. Fatemeh Rabbani conducted landuse change and climate change modeling, respectively. Writing, reviewing and editing of the manuscript was done by Dr. Karim C. Abbaspour. The authors declare that the manuscript has been read and approved by all named authors. We further confirm that the order of authors listed in the manuscript has been approved by all of us.
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Norouzi Nazar, M.S., Asadolahi, Z., Rabbani, F. et al. Modeling the integrated effects of landuse and climate change on the hydrologic response of Gorganroud watershed in Iran. Theor Appl Climatol 151, 1687–1707 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-022-04345-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-022-04345-5