Temporal and Spatial Assessment of Supply and Demand of the Water-yield Ecosystem Service for Water Scarcity Management
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Temporal and Spatial Assessment of Supply and Demand of the Water-yield Ecosystem Service for Water Scarcity Management in Arid to Semi-arid Ecosystems Mohsen Sharafatmandrad 1
& Azam Khosravi Mashizi
1
Received: 29 April 2020 / Accepted: 28 October 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract
Water scarcity is one of the problems affecting people’s livelihoods in arid and semi-arid areas, requiring a sustainable balance between water demands and water resources. This study was carried out to assess temporal and spatial distribution of water supply and demand in order to help managers to overcome water scarcity in Jiroft basin, southeastern Iran. Spatial supply and demand of water were mapped and standardized rainfall index (SPI) was used to assess drought for a 20 years period (1994–2014). Supply and demand of water were matched in 23% of the basin area, mostly concentrated in the cold zones. Water supply was reduced up to 80% during dry years, declining water supply-demand matching to 5% of the basin area. Shrubgrass rangelands and deciduous woodlands were the most valuable land covers for conservation with $ 1,100 and $ 936 per hectare water prices respectively. Water value dropped more than 72% in mismanaged ecosystems (p < 0.01). Our finding showed that water supply-demand ratio can be used as a proxy of ecosystem health and water-yield, which can provide a good information for water resources managers to reduce the threats of water scarcity in arid and semi-arid regions. Keywords Ecosystem services . Hydrology . InVEST . Water yield . Vegetation
1 Introduction Water scarcity is a critical issue across the world, occurring when there is not enough water to meet all demands (Bond et al. 2019). Global demand for water has increased in recent
* Mohsen Sharafatmandrad [email protected]; [email protected]
1
Department of Natural Science, Faculty of Natural Resources, University of Jiroft, 8th km of Jiroft Bandar Abbas road, P.O. Box: 7867161167, Jiroft, Iran
M. Sharafatmandrad, A. Khosravi Mashizi
years (Coates et al. 2012) and water use almost doubled in the second half of the twentieth century (MA 2005), whereas water supply has dramatically decreased especially in arid regions (Bates et al. 2008). Water supply is altered as a result of factors such as land-use and land-cover changes (Ávila-García et al. 2020; Aires et al. 2020), precipitation variability (de Moura et al. 2020; Belete et al. 2020; Zamani et al. 2020) and management (Srivastava et al. 2020). Knowing the impacts of these factors on water supply can provide initial warnings of water scarcity which is useful for water resources managers (Yao et al. 2018). Climate change is another factor which increased the gap between water demand and available supply by changing precipitation pattern (de Moura et al. 2020; Pittock 2011). Human as both user and manager, is one of the main drivers of increasing water scarcity by changing the balance between water supply and demand in the ecosystems (Wang et al. 2020). There
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