Relationship between Land Use Change and Water Yield in Gorgan-rood Watershed

In recent decades, drastic land use changes in Golestan province caused to reduce a substantial amount of Hyrcanian forest. To investigate the changes, land cover maps produced using Landsat satellite imagery classification of sensors TM from 1984, 2012 and 2016 respectively used as input data in Land Change Modeler (LCM) to predict land cover changes in 2030. In order to assess the accuracy of modeling, statistics of relative performance characteristic (ROC), ratio Hits/False Alarms and figure of merit was used. In continue to investigate the role of land use changes in water yield as one of ecosystem services was discussed. The results show the accuracy of artificial neural network with the ROC equal to 0.949, the ratio Hits/False Alarms equal to 57 percent and the figure of merit is equal to 11 percent. Land use change modeling results showed that from 1984 to 2012, The most prominent changes were related to reduction of forest cover. This process modeling using artificial neural network showed, from 2016 to 2030 forest cover will be reduced about 30361 hectares. The results of water yield study showed that runoff in the area, particularly in the East and North East area has increased. This increase in the amount of runoff occurred as a result of land use change on forest ecosystems to agriculture. Results of this study improve our understanding of hydrological consequences of land-use changes, and provide needed knowledge for effectively developing and managing land-use for sustainability and productivity in the Gorgan-rood watershed.