Introducing a new conceptual instantaneous unit hydrograph model based on a hydraulic approach

ABSTRACT

A novel approach is introduced for simulation of instantaneous unit hydrographs (IUHs). The model consists of a series of linear reservoirs that are connected to each other, and is referred to as the inter-connected linear reservoir model (ICLRM). By assuming the flow between two reservoirs is a linear function of the difference between the water levels in the reservoirs, a system of first-order linear differential equations is obtained as the ICLRM governing equation. By solving the equations, the discharge from the last reservoir is considered as an IUH. A small-scale laboratory device was constructed for the simulation of IUHs using the model. By studying four hydrographs extracted from the literature, and simulating them using both the ICLRM and the Nash model, it is concluded that the ICLRM can predict these hydrographs more accurately than the Nash model. Due to the simplicity of the construction and operation of the ICLRM and, more importantly, its visual aspect, the ICLRM may be considered as an effective educational tool for studying IUHs.     

Transforming local natural resource conflicts to cooperation in a changing climate: Bangladesh and Nepal lessons

ABSTRACT

Since the 1990s, climate change impact discourse has highlighted potential for large scale violent conflicts. However, the role of climate stresses on local conflicts over natural resources, the role of policies and adaptation in these conflicts, and opportunities to enhance cooperation have been neglected. These gaps are addressed in this paper using evidence from participatory action research on 79 cases of local collective action over natural resources that experience conflicts in Bangladesh and Nepal. Climate trends and stresses contributed to just under half of these conflict cases. Nine factors that enable greater cooperation and transformation of conflict are identified. Participatory dialogue and negotiation processes, while not sufficient, changed understanding, attitudes and positions of actors. Many of the communities innovated physical measures to overcome natural resource constraints, underlying conflict, and/or institutional reforms. These changes were informed by improving understanding of resource limitations and indigenous knowledge. Learning networks among community organizations encouraged collective action by sharing successes and creating peer pressure. Incentives for cooperation were important. For example, when community organizations formally permitted excluded traditional resource users to access resources, those actors complied with rules and paid towards management costs. However, elites were able to use policy gaps to capture resources with changed characteristics due to climate change. In most of the cases where conflict persisted, power, policy and institutional barriers prevented community-based organizations from taking up potential adaptations and innovations. Policy frameworks recognizing collective action and supporting flexible innovation in governance and adaptation would enable wider transformation of natural resource conflicts into cooperation.

Key policy insights

• Climate stresses, policy gaps and interventions can all worsen local natural resource conflicts.

• Sectoral knowledge and technical approaches to adaptation are open to elite capture and can foster conflicts.

• Many local natural resource conflicts can be resolved but this requires an enabling environment for participatory dialogue, external facilitation, flexible responses to context, and recognition of disadvantaged stakeholder interests.

• Transforming conflict to greater cooperation mostly involves social and institutional changes, so adaptation policies should focus less on physical works and more on enabling factors such as negotiation, local institutions, knowledge, and incentives.

     

Formulation of the Caspian Sea’s legal regime using a joint zone approach

The legal regime of the Caspian Sea has been determined under Treaties 1921 and 1940 by and between Iran and former Soviet Union. In fact, we are neither to explain it nor to determine. As understood from the provisions therein, the exploitation and use of the Caspian Sea by both countries are based on the Condominium. However, there is a 10-nautical mile strip as exclusive fishing areas which have been allocated to the states under the 1940 treaty. It means that Soviet Union and Iran may benefit the marine livings resources out of that strip on an equal manner. This right also includes the seabed and underlying bed. So, the legal regime of this sea may be based on a 10-nautical mile exclusive region for all five states and the remaining part as common and joint area under an agreement until an explaining and supervising organization is established to exploit and supervise over living and non-livings resources.     

Flood vulnerability and buildings’ flood exposure assessment in a densely urbanised city: comparative analysis of three scenarios using a neural network approach

Natural Hazards - Advances in the availability of multi-sensor, remote sensing-derived datasets, and machine learning algorithms can now provide an unprecedented possibility to predict flood events...     

Characterization of Iranian Obsidian Artifacts by PIXE and Multivariate Statistical Analysis

It had long been thought that obsidian found in Iranian sites originated from Anatolia and Armenia, but new research has challenged this assumption. In this study, 68 samples of obsidian obtained from an archaeological survey of Nader‐Tepe Aslanduz were analyzed by Proton Induced X‐ray Emission (PIXE). Nader‐Tepe Aslanduz is a tell site west of the city of Aslanduz in the Parsabad county of the Ardebil province in northern Iran. The site was inhabited from the first millennium B.C. to A.D. 17, and its history may extend back to the third or fourth millennium B.C. Our chemical composition results have been combined with obsidian composition data from Turkey and Armenia and subjected to Principal Component Analysis (PCA). This analysis shows that obsidian from each location can be grouped into distinctive classes—the obsidian from Nader‐Tepe Aslanduz is therefore probably derived from volcanic outcrops of the Sahand and Sabalan region. This study has been unable to assign a known source from Anatolia and Armenia for the obsidian of Nader‐Tepe Aslanduz.     

GIS-based landslide susceptibility modeling: A comparison between fuzzy multi-criteria and machine learning algorithms

Hazards and disasters have always negative impacts on the way of life.Landslide is an overwhelming natural as well as man-made disaster that causes loss of natural resources and human properties throughout theworld.The present study aimed to assess and compare the prediction efficiency of different models in landslide susceptibility in the Kysuca river basin,Slovakia.In this regard,the fuzzy decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory combining with the analytic network process(FDEMATEL-ANP),Na?ve Bayes(NB)classifier,and random forest(RF)classifier were considered.Initially,a landslide inventory map was produced with 2000 landslide and nonlandslide points by randomly dividedwith a ratio of 70%:30%for training and testing,respectively.The geospatial database for assessing the landslide susceptibility was generated with the help of 16 landslide conditioning factors by allowing for topographical,hydrological,lithological,and land cover factors.The ReliefF methodwas considered for determining the significance of selected conditioning factors and inclusion in the model building.Consequently,the landslide susceptibility maps(LSMs)were generated using the FDEMATEL-ANP,Na?ve Bayes(NB)classifier,and random forest(RF)classifier models.Finally,the area under curve(AUC)and different arithmetic evaluation were used for validating and comparing the results and models.The results revealed that random forest(RF)classifier is a promising and optimum model for landslide susceptibility in the study area with a very high value of area under curve(AUC=0.954),lower value of mean absolute error(MAE=0.1238)and root mean square error(RMSE=0.2555),and higher value of Kappa index(K=0.8435)and overall accuracy(OAC=92.2%).     

Turning conflicts into cooperation? The role of adaptive learning and deliberation in managing natural resources conflicts in Nepal

ABSTRACT

Conflicts over natural resources are likely to escalate under changing socio-economic contexts and climate change. This paper tests the effectiveness of what we term Adaptive Learning and Deliberation (ALD) in understanding and addressing conflicts over the local management of forests and water, drawing on experimental work in Nepal. Based on a three-year action research project, the paper offers policy and practical insights on how complex and protracted conflicts can be addressed through the researcher-facilitated enquiry and deliberative processes that form the core of the ALD approach. The conflicts included in the study are a result of diverse environmental, political and economic factors. We analyze experimental practices in two sites, where our research team facilitated the ALD process, gathering evidence in relation to conflicting institutional issues, all of which was then fed into researcher-mediated and evidence-informed deliberations on conflict management. The analysis shows that the ALD process was helpful in rearranging local institutions to accommodate the interests of the conflicting groups and, to some extent, to challenge some of the underlying exclusionary provisions of forest and water institutions in Nepalese society. We also identify three key limitations of this approach – transaction costs, the need for strong research and facilitative capacity within the research team, and researchers’ engagement with the conflicting stakeholders.

Key policy insights

• Natural resource-based conflicts are intensifying in Nepal in recent years, due to heavy reliance of people on these resources for livelihoods, poor governance, and protection-oriented policies.

• Improved ways to facilitate cooperation among conflicting stakeholders are needed, as standard methods have often failed to address socio-environmental drivers of conflicts.

• The ALD approach can potentially help mitigate conflict and foster cooperation in natural resource management.

     

Changing Land Use a Threat to Surface Water Quality: a Vulnerability Assessment Approach in Zanjanroud Watershed,Central Iran

Maintaining the quality of surface water resources as one of the most vital water supplies has always been at the center of global concerns. A set of manifest and latent factors have yet been identified by researchers worldwide that are subject to affect the quality of surface water. Among which, the effect of land use change, due to a spatial and temporal complexity, is often not easily verifiable. The present study attempts to offer an index-based model to quantify vulnerability of surface water resources in a semi arid basin in central Iran against land use changes. For this, water quality data including Na, K, Mg, Ca, Sodium Adsorption Ratio (SAR), total anions (Sum. A), SO₄, Cl, HCO₃, EC, TDS, and pH were collected from hydrometric stations over a period of 26 years (1987?2013). In order to detect land use changes, the land use maps of the years 1987, 1998, 2002, 2009, and 2013 were prepared from TM satellite images using supervised classification method. At next step, changing patterns of different land uses were traced by Shanon’s Diversity Index (SHDI) as a metric of patch diversity indicating diversity and heterogeneity of a landscape over time. Relationship between the SHDI values and water quality indicators revealed the impact of land use changes on quality of surface water resources. Statistical analysis confirmed a significant relationship between nine water quality factors and water discharge in the basin during the study period. From 1998 to 2009, the greatest changes were visible in the total anions, Ca, SO₄, and HCO₃. These parameters along with salinity were increasing in almost all sub-basins. According to the results, conversion of poor rangelands to rain fed agriculture fields is the most apparent land use change occurred in the study area over the study period. In 1987, SHDI as an indicator of the diversity and changes in the basin, showed a significant relationship with good rangelands (R² =–0.835). This indicates that fragmentation of the entire watershed area was initiated in 1987, which reached its peak in 2013. Generally speaking, urbanization, poor rangeland, and irrigated agriculture were recognized as three influential land uses adversely affect the water quality in the study area.     

Investigation of non-isothermal electron effects on the dust acoustic waves in four components dusty plasma

The time fractional modified KdV, the so-called TFMKdV equation is solved to study the nonlinear propagation of the dust acoustic (DA) solitary waves in un-magnetized four components dusty plasma. This plasma consists of positively charged warm adiabatic dust, negatively charged cold dust, non-isothermal electrons and Maxwellian ions. The TFMKdV equation is derived by using semi-inverse and Agrawal’s method and solved by the Laplace Adomian decomposition method (LADM). The effects of the time fractional order (β), the ratio of dust to ion temperature (δ _d ), the time (τ), the mass and charge ratio (α), the non-isothermal parameter (γ) and wave velocity (v) on the DA solitary wave are studied. Our results show that the variations of the amplitude of DA solitary wave versus (γ) are in agreement with the results obtained previously. Moreover, the time fractional order plays a role of higher order perturbation in modulating the soliton shape. The achievements of this research for the DA solitary waves may be applicable in space plasma environments and laboratory plasmas.     

Head-on collision of electron acoustic solitary waves in a plasma with nonextensive hot electrons

The head-on collision between two electron-acoustic solitary waves (EASWs) in an unmagnetized plasma is investigated, including a cold electrons fluid, hot electrons, obeying a nonextensive distribution and stationary ions. By using the extended Poincaré-Lighthill–Kuo (PLK) perturbation method, the analytical phase shifts following the head-on collision are derived. The effects of the ratio of the number density of hot electrons to the number density of cold electrons α, and the nonextensive parameter q on the phase shifts are studied. It is found that q and the hot-to-cold electron density ratio significantly modify the phase shifts.