Extended Abstract
Introduction
Watersheds face challenges in the field of unsustainable resource exploitation, climate change, and human pressures, which have led to a decrease in the quality and quantity of water resources, soil erosion, reduction of vegetation cover, and ultimately the functional instability of ecosystems. Watersheds, as the basic units of land management, are of great importance in environmental planning due to their strategic position in nourishing water resources, reducing the effects of floods, preserving biodiversity, and ensuring the sustainability of ecosystems. Unauthorized construction, extensive changes in land use, destruction of vegetation cover, and overexploitation of water resources have changed the natural state of the Taleghan Town watershed. The DPSIR framework, with a logical structure including drivers, pressures, status, impacts, and responses, is considered a suitable tool for causal analysis of environmental consequences resulting from human development and formulation of management responses. However, for the effective application of this framework in planning, it is necessary to integrate it with mDSS multi-criteria decision-making tools. This tool allows for the evaluation and comparison of different management options in the form of measurable scenarios and, by integrating environmental, social, and economic data, assists decision-makers in selecting optimal solutions. In the present study, by simultaneously using the DPSIR conceptual approach and the mDSS environment, an appropriate management model for the Taleghan town watershed is designed, which can accurately identify the factors affecting ecological instability and provide optimal and applicable management responses to improve the current situation.
Materials and Methods
The Taleghan town watershed is located in Alborz Province, and with a total area of 3,667.9 hectares, it is considered part of the Taleghan Dam watershed. In this study, management modeling for the optimal selection of solutions in the mDSS environment with the DPSIR approach of the Taleghan town watershed in Alborz province has been studied. The mDSS software is a modeling environment that has 4 stages of conceptual model explanation, design, selection, and group decision-making. For this purpose, first, the watershed status was analyzed through the DPSIR approach. After identifying the problems and determining their relative importance and considering the results of the DPSIR approach, 12 management activities were prepared to solve the problems of the watershed. In this stage, according to the selected evaluation criteria (economic, social and environmental) and the selected solutions presented in the previous stage (proposed management activities), the analysis matrix was formed. After forming the analysis matrix, the evaluation criteria were normalized. In the next stage, a sustainability chart was prepared. Finally, the SAW technique was used in the mDSS software environment to prioritize the proposed management activities. Also, the selected solutions were prioritized according to the criteria of feasibility, effectiveness, public acceptance, cost-effectiveness and quick return, in order to formulate executive plans at the Taleghan town watershed level using the SAW method.
Results and Discussion
Based on the prepared DPSIR model, the drivers have four factors, pressures have one factor, the status has three factors, the effects have two factors, and the solutions are based on the opinions of local communities, 12 cases. The results showed that the solution "Implementing biomechanical flood control and water storage measures" with a score of (0.658) was ranked first, and the solution "Developing agricultural and livestock product conversion and processing industries" with a score of (0.625) was ranked second. The point that shows the performance in the Taleghan town watershed sustainability diagram was located near the center of the triangle, but the environmental and economic macro criteria have assigned more weight than the social macro criterion, which has caused the performance point to be biased towards environmental and economic criteria. Analysis of the sustainability graph showed that environmental and economic criteria had more weight than social criteria. This indicates the region's high sensitivity to ecological sustainability and the necessity of preserving natural resources for sustainable development. The results of prioritizing the selected solutions using the SAW method in the mDSS software environment showed that the solution "Implementing biomechanical flood control and water storage measures" with a score of (0.8) was ranked first, and the solutions "Developing greenhouse product production" with a score of (0.7) and "Implementing biological measures" with a score of (0.6) were ranked second and third, respectively.
Conclusion
The results of this study indicate that in the current critical conditions of this area, solutions that directly affect the control of hydrological processes, reduce flood risk, and increase water productivity are more important than other measures. The results of the sustainability analysis showed that environmental and economic criteria had more weight than social criteria. This led to the solutions that have direct and rapid effects on improving the environmental and economic situation to obtain higher rankings. The DPSIR framework is a powerful conceptual tool for analyzing cause and effect in human-environmental systems. On the other hand, mDSS provides an analytical environment that can model and evaluate management responses in the context of multidimensional data and indicators. The combination of these two tools, along with multi-criteria decision-making methods, provides a suitable platform for developing efficient and sustainable management solutions in watersheds. The present study, using the DPSIR analytical approach and the mDSS decision-support tool, showed that selecting watershed management solutions requires a systematic, data-driven, and participatory approach. The use of multi-criteria decision-making tools, along with accurate knowledge of the environmental and social situation, can lead to more effective, sustainable, and locally appropriate decisions. However, to enhance the comprehensiveness and generalizability of the results, it is necessary in the future to: expand the scope of stakeholder participation; compare and integrate different multi-criteria decision-making methods; include social data more carefully alongside environmental and economic data; and monitor the effectiveness of selected measures over time in the field. |
