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Sustainable Practices in Watershed Management and Ecological Restoration
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Sustainable Practices in Watershed Management and Ecological Restoration

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 June 2023) | Viewed by 14027

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Zeinab Hazbavi

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Natural Resources, Water Management Research Center, University of Mohaghegh Ardabili, Ardabil 56199-11367, Iran
Interests: watershed health assessment; geologic and geomorphic processes; soil and water conservation; soil amendment application; watershed management research

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Through the development of land for agriculture and other human activities, humankind has conquered more than 40% of the area of all continents. Today, we know that future generations will inherit affected environmental systems. However, few people know how to adequately assess the consequences of their behavior on a watershed scale. It is time to identify traceable practices that can impact future human development in relation to dynamic environmental conditions. Sustainability acts as a point of convergence where human practices can be examined in terms of their supportive capacity over a long period of time.

It is important to emphasize that there are sustainable solutions to the problems created in the current century, mainly due to destructive anthropogenic activities. At odds with sustainable development is the current approach to watershed resource management. It is necessary to shift to a new paradigm in land management and restoration approaches.

Sustainable practices can help regenerate land as well as maintaining long-term stability in the watershed balance, with sufficient resources. For instance, one of the sustainable practices includes rainwater and surface water protection on land using the implementation of systems with desirable measures to increase the water retention capacity in an entire watershed (often with erosion control measures). Considering people's participation as a core component of these watershed management practices guarantees sustainability. Towards this, the objective of this Special Issue is to explore the practices and strategies successfully involved in sustainable watershed management and ecological restoration in different parts of the world.

In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:

  • Adaptive watershed management;
  • Climate change mitigation;
  • Ecological sustainability;
  • Eco-security analysis;
  • Indigenous knowledge;
  • Innovative approaches;
  • Nature governance;
  • Participatory management;
  • Policy and decision making;
  • Rainfall–runoff balance;
  • Resilient conservation;
  • Socio-hydrological systems;
  • Sustainable restoration.

Dr. Zeinab Hazbavi
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • community capacity building
  • ecological recovery
  • ecosystem services
  • government decision making
  • low-impact development
  • nature-based solutions
  • resiliency
  • risk management
  • socio-economic metrics
  • watershed health and sustainability

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Published Papers (5 papers)

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Research

16 pages, 3024 KiB  
Article
Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Carbon Sequestration in Different Ecosystems of Iran and Its Relationship with Agricultural Droughts
by Muhammad Kamangar, Ozgur Kisi and Masoud Minaei
Sustainability 2023, 15(8), 6577; https://doi.org/10.3390/su15086577 - 13 Apr 2023
Viewed by 1967
Abstract
The increase in environmental and human-related changes (e.g., increase in the carbon cycle flux of plants) has increased the dynamism of ecosystems. Examining fluctuations in net primary production (NPP) is very important in adopting correct strategies for ecosystem management. The current study explores [...] Read more.
The increase in environmental and human-related changes (e.g., increase in the carbon cycle flux of plants) has increased the dynamism of ecosystems. Examining fluctuations in net primary production (NPP) is very important in adopting correct strategies for ecosystem management. The current study explores the spatiotemporal variations in NPP and its association with agricultural droughts in Iran’s ecosystems over 20 years (2000–2020). Mann–Kendall and Sen’s slope methods in each pixel were used to track changes in trends. Drought upsets the terrestrial carbon cycle balance. In this study, Vegetation Health Index (VHI) used to assess drought that extracted from different bands of images satellite. Then, the relationship between NPP rates and agricultural droughts was investigated through running Pearson correlation. The results demonstrated that Iran’s annual share of carbon sequestration is 1.38 kg*C/m2/year. The highest carbon sequestration rate was recorded in Caspian Hyrcanian forests. In contrast, the lowest rate was observed in the Arabian Desert and East Sahero-Arabian xeric shrublands in southwestern Iran. Moreover, the highest photosynthesis variations were recorded in Arabian Desert and East Sahero-Arabian xeric shrublands and Tigris–Euphrates alluvial salt marsh, while the lowest changes were registered in Badghyz and Karabil. In total, 34.2% of the studied pixels showed a statistically significant rising or falling trend. Sen’s slope estimator demonstrated that the sharpest negative trend in carbon sequestration belonged to Caspian Hyrcanian mixed forests (−12.24 g*C/m2/year), while the sharpest positive trend was observed in Azerbaijan shrub desert and steppe (12.29 g*C/m2/year). The results of the Pearson correlation revealed significant correlations between NPP and VHI in different ecosystems with coefficients ranging from −0.93 to 0.95. The largest area with a positive correlation (33.97%) belonged to the Zagros Mountains forest steppe. Identification of areas with the greatest carbon sequestration changes could result in prioritizing varied ecosystems management for carbon sequestering. It can be also utilized in environmental planning such as scaling up ecosystem values or estimating current and past ecological capacity. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Practices in Watershed Management and Ecological Restoration)
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18 pages, 2057 KiB  
Article
Sustainable Watershed Protection from the Public Perspective, China
by Chunci Chen, Guizhen He and Mingzhao Yu
Sustainability 2023, 15(7), 6119; https://doi.org/10.3390/su15076119 - 1 Apr 2023
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1661
Abstract
The conservation and sustainability of the Yongding River Watershed attracted great attention as Beijing and Zhangjiakou jointly hosted the Winter Olympics in 2022. The government has implemented many management measures and restoration programs in the past decade. However, information and opinions from the [...] Read more.
The conservation and sustainability of the Yongding River Watershed attracted great attention as Beijing and Zhangjiakou jointly hosted the Winter Olympics in 2022. The government has implemented many management measures and restoration programs in the past decade. However, information and opinions from the public perspective were rarely considered. This paper investigates 626 residents neighboring the Yongding River Watershed through a face-to-face questionnaire survey to reveal public perceptions, attitudes, concerns, and behaviors toward sustainable watershed protection and proposes multiple regression models to explore factors affecting their concerns and behaviors. The results show that the majority of respondents (52–58%) have limited knowledge about the watershed environment, and their views are influenced by living places. More than half of the respondents (52%) believe that upstream should take responsibility for watershed protection, but 72% are not aware that upstream suffers economic restrictions. Public behaviors toward watershed protection are diverse depending on knowledge, attitudes, and concerns about the watershed environment as well as on sociodemographic background. Our results highlight that a better understanding of watershed protection can be used to foster public participation and increase support for watershed management initiatives. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Practices in Watershed Management and Ecological Restoration)
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16 pages, 1970 KiB  
Article
Hydrological Drought Severity in Different Return Periods in Rivers of Ardabil Province, Iran
by Elnaz Ghabelnezam, Raoof Mostafazadeh, Zeinab Hazbavi and Guangwei Huang
Sustainability 2023, 15(3), 1993; https://doi.org/10.3390/su15031993 - 20 Jan 2023
Cited by 9 | Viewed by 2152
Abstract
Hydrological drought (HD) characterization with different return periods is essential to appropriately design the best water management practices. In particular, characterizing the interactive relations of discharge, drought, and return periods using a novel triple diagram can deepen the interpretation of regional droughts, which [...] Read more.
Hydrological drought (HD) characterization with different return periods is essential to appropriately design the best water management practices. In particular, characterizing the interactive relations of discharge, drought, and return periods using a novel triple diagram can deepen the interpretation of regional droughts, which have not been adequately considered, especially in semi-arid areas. Considering the critical role of HD in water exploitation and management in Iran, this study was therefore conducted to analyze the HD in different return periods in rivers of the Ardabil Province (area = 17,953 km2). To this end, the streamflow drought index (SDI) was computed using DrinC software at 1-, 3-, and 6-month time scales for 25 hydrometric stations during 1981–2014. Then, the drought severity was evaluated by CumFreq software in different return periods (2, 5, 10, 25, 50, and 100 years). Finally, the relationship between discharge, SDI, and return periods was analyzed using triple diagram models. The results revealed that the drought events had mild (−1 ≤ SDI < 0) and moderate (−1.5 ≤ SDI < −1) severity for most study stations in the study area. The mean values of SDI in the 1-, 3-, and 6-month time scales were 1.08, 0.80, and 0.55, respectively. At all study time scales, the drought severity in both rivers with low and high flows increased with increasing return periods. In such a way, the maximum drought severity has been found for rivers with high flow at a 100-year return period. The current results can be considered a screening tool for the distinctive conservation and directive management of watershed resources. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Practices in Watershed Management and Ecological Restoration)
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19 pages, 4296 KiB  
Article
Prediction of the Discharge Coefficient in Compound Broad-Crested-Weir Gate by Supervised Data Mining Techniques
by Meysam Nouri, Parveen Sihag, Ozgur Kisi, Mohammad Hemmati, Shamsuddin Shahid and Rana Muhammad Adnan
Sustainability 2023, 15(1), 433; https://doi.org/10.3390/su15010433 - 27 Dec 2022
Cited by 9 | Viewed by 3248
Abstract
The current investigation evaluated the discharge coefficient of a combined compound rectangular broad-crested-weir (BCW) gate (Cdt) using the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling approach and soft computing models. First, CFD was applied to the experimental data and 61 compound BCW [...] Read more.
The current investigation evaluated the discharge coefficient of a combined compound rectangular broad-crested-weir (BCW) gate (Cdt) using the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling approach and soft computing models. First, CFD was applied to the experimental data and 61 compound BCW gates were numerically simulated by resolving the Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes equations and stress turbulence models. Then, six data-driven procedures, including M5P tree, random forest (RF), support vector machine (SVM), Gaussian process (GP), multimode ANN and multilinear regression (MLR) were used for estimating the coefficient of discharge (Cdt) of the weir gates. The results showed the superlative accuracy of the SVM model compared to M5P, RF, GP and MLR in predicting the discharge coefficient. The sensitivity investigation revealed the h1/H as the most effective parameter in predicting the Cdt, followed by the d/p, b/B0, B/B0 and z/p. The multimode ANN model reduced the root mean square error (RMSE) of M5P, RF, GP, SVM and MLR by 37, 13, 6.9, 6.5 and 32%, respectively. The graphical inspection indicated the multimode ANN model as the most suitable for predicting the Cdt of a BCW gate with minimum RMSE and maximum correlation. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Practices in Watershed Management and Ecological Restoration)
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23 pages, 2942 KiB  
Article
Spatial Comparative Analysis of Landscape Fragmentation Metrics in a Watershed with Diverse Land Uses in Iran
by Nazila Alaei, Raoof Mostafazadeh, Abazar Esmali Ouri, Zeinab Hazbavi, Mearaj Sharari and Guangwei Huang
Sustainability 2022, 14(22), 14876; https://doi.org/10.3390/su142214876 - 10 Nov 2022
Cited by 10 | Viewed by 2816
Abstract
Knowledge of landscape fragmentation is known to be important in ecological integrity, hydrological processes, urban planning, sustainable land management, and policymaking. Recent anecdotal studies reveal a need for analytical quantification of landscape fragmentation at different levels. Therefore, the present study was conducted at [...] Read more.
Knowledge of landscape fragmentation is known to be important in ecological integrity, hydrological processes, urban planning, sustainable land management, and policymaking. Recent anecdotal studies reveal a need for analytical quantification of landscape fragmentation at different levels. Therefore, the present study was conducted at KoozehTopraghi Watershed, Ardabil Province, Iran, where covers by different land uses/covers, to (a) explore the spatial pattern of landscape fragmentation metrics comprehensively in different scales, (b) distinguish the landscape fragmentation hot spots, and (c) investigate the spatial clustering of landscape fragmentation metrics. The behaviors of 7, 10, and 13 fragmentation metrics concerning three levels of patch, class, and landscape across 36 sub-watersheds were explored using principal component analysis (PCA) and expert elicitation. The Getis-Ord Gi* and local Moran’s I indices were also used to analyze the hot spots and clusters of landscape fragmentation, respectively. The results verified the high degree of spatial variability of the metrics in the three levels of fragmentation analysis. The class-level fragmentation analysis showed that the watershed is characterized by high-fragmented residential land use and low-fragmented dry farming land use. The spatial trend analysis at the landscape level further indicated that sub-watersheds 1, 2, 11, 21, to 26, and 34 to 36, mainly located in lowlands and central parts, allocated better status considering the fragmentation metrics rather than other parts of the watershed. The significant hot spots and high clusters of fragmentation also were distributed in different parts of the watershed in terms of various landscape metrics. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Practices in Watershed Management and Ecological Restoration)
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