Impacts of human factors on decrease of water level of Parishan wetland

In recent years human activities have disturbed ecosystem balance on the earth and caused many environmental issues that posed serious consequences to their lives. Unauthorized underground water uses are increasing, especially in arid and semi arid regions of country in recent decades because of the droughts that have occurred within these decades. Parishan wetland is in south west of Fars province, in Dashte-Arzhan-Parishan protected area, and is the largest freshwater lake in country. The water level of this wetland has strongly dropped due to different factors such as drought and unauthorized well drilling around the lake in recent years. In this research eight buffer zones from the lake were created using ArcGIS and wells in each buffer zone were extracted in order to investigate the current well effects on water level. Total annual discharge of all wells in buffer zones was obtained, and finally regression analysis used to examine the relationship between water level and well discharges in SPSS 16. The results showed that there is a statistically significant relationship between water level and well discharges at 99% confidence level with high correlation coefficient for all buffer zones. Regression analyses showed that human factors and wells have significant effect on decreasing in wetland water levels.