| چکیده انگلیسی مقاله |
The soil is essential to humans and all living things on the earth and the foundation of any water-energy-food nexus system. Besides many services provided by soil, it importantly stores water and made it available to agricultural crops which play a vital task in food security. However, the importance of soil in exiting nexuses still has not been indoctrinated by planner, decision maker and even experts, worldwide. Owing to this, soil as a basic commodity needs to be considered and managed across other elements of any nexus. In this regard, the balancement among various main components of the ecosystem based on the Soil-Water-Energy-Food (SWEF) nexus approach is introduced as one of the important parts of integrated and adaptive watershed management approaches. To best our knowledge, this is the first application of integrated watershed management at the watershed scale. Therefore, the present endeavour has been formulated to designate and apply the SWEF approach in order to develop a conceptual model for the adaptive management of proper land use/cover allocation at the watersheds scale. The approach was consequently applied to the Shazand Watershed, Markazi Province, Iran. Towards that, different indicators viz., soil erosion, soil organic carbon (SOC), water and energy consumption, mass productivity, and economic productivity were considered. Eventually, the soil-water-energy-food nexus index (SWEFNI) for different land uses/crops was calculated using a compound indicator for the node year of 2014. The results showed that SWFENI varied from 0.19 (the worst) for rangeland to 0.78 (the best) for almond plantation. The current approach developed in the study can be examined in any watershed across the world. |
