A critical review on scale concept in GIS-based watershed management studies
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A critical review on scale concept in GIS-based watershed management studies Marjan Asgari1
Received: 15 June 2020 / Revised: 2 September 2020 / Accepted: 7 September 2020 Ó Korean Spatial Information Society 2020
Abstract Watershed management is critical in achieving sustainable development for water resources. Geographic information system (GIS) provides efficient functions to store, retrieve, analyze, and display spatial data. Therefore, GIS is used to develop watersheds’ decision support systems (DSS) to find useful ways of solving waterbodies’ problems. Studies on watershed problems need considering both biophysical conditions and information on human– environment relationships, which points to the need to deal with different geographical fields. Definitions of scale in each field and making clear connections among them is essential for having comprehensive and practical water management plans. These scales are spatial, social, and political scale. However, in studies on developing a DSS for watershed management, there is a gap in defining social and political scales and aligning them with spatial scale, which can be a barrier to have concrete and integrated watershed GIS-based DSS’s. This study reviews papers in dominating fields of GIS-based DSS’s for watershed management and provides proof that studies have focused only on spatial scales, while social and political scales are considerably neglected. This paper aims to point to this problem by reviewing relevant papers, elaborating some critical issues arisen from this neglect, and suggesting some future directions. Keywords Watershed management Scale Decision support system GIS
& Marjan Asgari [email protected] 1
Department of Geography, Environment and Geomatics, University of Guelph, Guelph, Canada
1 Introduction The water supply, which is water for households and businesses, livestock, crop irrigation, and rural industry, is the part of freshwater that is the focus of hydrological studies since human activities have been posing threats to both the quality and the quantity of their sources such as lakes and rivers. The overuse of freshwater such as excessive demand and inefficient water use has caused decrease in the quantity of water supply sources, and the pollution from point and non-point sources has caused the degradation of the quality of water supply sources. Therefore, there is a need for comprehensive, multi-source, and integrated plans for mitigating water pollution and providing a balance between demands and needs through watershed management [1]. Every single point on the land surface belongs to at least one watershed, which is also called catchment, drainage basin, or basin. Watershed is a part of the land in which the land’s receiving precipitation or streams flow to the same outlet due to the topography of the watershed. Due to the fact that the watershed boundaries can be measured using widely available topographic data, and also because in each watershed all the streams flow to the same outlet in which the amount of available
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