The Impact of Land Use Change on Water Yield in the Teraz Watershed, Khuzestan Province, Southwestern Iran.

Water is one of the critical needs of human life and living things. Therefore, proper planning is important for its consumption all over the world, especially in Iran. This study was conducted to evaluate the impacts of land use change on water yield in the Teraz watershed, Khuzestan province, Iran, from 1990 to 2050. Water yield was evaluated using integrated valuation of ecosystem services and tradeoffs (InVEST) tool and land use was mapped using the maximum likelihood classification in the ENVI 5.3, and CA-Markov in the TerrSet environment. Moreover, the relationship between water yield and landscape metrics, including the number of patches (NP), patch density (PD), landscape shape index (LSI), and Largest Patch Index (LPI), was considered based on the Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) method in the Arc GIS 10.5. The results showed that the area of forest and rangeland in the studied area decreased in the last 30 years, by 3199 and 1611 ha, respectively, and the area of agriculture and construction land uses increased by 4388 and 387 ha, respectively. It is predicted that in the next 30 years, 2442 ha of forests will decrease and the area of agriculture, rangeland, and construction land uses will increase by 1651, 687, and 102 ha, respectively. It was found that the total volume of available water yield in the region is equal to 26.5 Mm3 in 2020, on average of 857 m3 ha-1, and based on that, the ranking of land uses is as follows: 1. Construction, 2. Rangeland, 3. Forest, 4. agriculture. The results of GWR confirmed that water yield had a significant and negative spatial relationships with the NP, PD, and LSI metrics (R2>=0.83, p-value>0.05), while its relationship with the LPI metric was a significant and positive relationship (R2>0.84, p-value>0.05). It can be concluded that the landscape features and land use pattern can determine the production and yield of water in the study area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]