Evaluating surface water sustainability of Ardabil Province watersheds

Availability and supplying adequate water is a fundamental prerequisite for socio-economic development of human societies. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the sustainability of surface water resources. The following criterion including resources (availability, variability), access (access to health), usage (domestic water use, agricultural water consumption), environment (baseflow, natural vegetation, environmental flow) and socio-economic capacities (literacy rates, the economically active population, employment in non-agricultural sector) were used to assess effective components on surface water sustainability in 21 sub-watersheds of Ardabil Province. The values of different criteria were standardized based on maximum method according to their numerical interval. The comparison of different water related components was provided using multi-dimensional spider-plots in the study area. The lowest and highest values of resource criteria (water per capita and rainfall coefficient of variations) were obtained in Shamsabad (16) and Hir (93) watersheds, respectively. The Nir, Pol-Almas, and Doostbeiglou watersheds having 60, 58, and 54 scores were identified as good condition, considering environment criteria and the other watersheds are critical. The capacity index had the highest and lowest values in Pol-Almas and Polsoltan watershed, respectively. Considering the access criteria, Shamsabad and Ahmad-Kandi watersheds had the highest and lowest scores, respectively. The mean standardized values of resource, usage, access, capacity and environment were 50, 60, 42, 38 and 25, respectively. In conclusion, the results showed that the access and resource criteria had the highest variations, and the environmental criteria were defined as undesirable conditions over the study area. It should be noted that the Central and Eastern parts of the study area had the same condition ​​in terms of their criteria scores.