Evaluation of hydrological response of Latian Dam watershed to afforestation in semi-arid climate

Natural forests provide a wide range of ecosystem services especially water-related benefits. However, the effects of afforestation in different situations may lead to contradictory results. In some cases, afforestation considered as a land use activity that threatens water resources security. So, it is necessary to evaluate the afforestation development in fragile ecosystems, such as arid and semi-arid regions. The main goal of this study is to quantify the hydrological responses of Latian Dam watershed to afforestation projects. To reach the goal, SWAT model were employed combined with meteorological data (daily), hydrological data (monthly) and spatial data to simulate the out flow of Latian Dam watershed, located in northeast of Tehran-Iran, under two land use scenarios (baseline & afforestation). The SWAT model showed good performance in the Latian Dam watershed with acceptable values for Nash-Sutcliffe, P-factor and R-factor which were 0.82, 0.82, 0.68, 0.98 respectively for calibration and 0.83, 0.84, 0.78, 0.78 respectively for validation at the outlet of watershed. Simulation results under proposed scenarios demonstrated that as afforestation expansion 8.5% of the study area, runoff declined by 2.7% in downstream. This research quantitatively showed that afforestation will reduce the runoff in Latian watershed. The result of this study suggested that it is necessary to fully assess the effects of afforestation development in the given area, especially on hydrologic responses of watershed.