Geography and Environmental Sustainability
Year:2016 | Volume:6 | Issue:19|Papers Count:7

In the last few decades, minimizing spaces has been implemented by current government not only to facilitate planning of development but also to have more control on local-regional spaces. To achieve this goal, performing the strategy of country divisions has been included in government agenda. Present study aims at investigating and analyzing the government’s approach in country divisions as well as the effects on the regional-urban inequality in Northern Khorasan province. Therefore, not only quantitative models and statistical software but also analytic-descriptive method has been used to determinate the relationship between country divisions and regional-urban inequality in Northern Khorasan province. The criteria (including social, economic, hygienic and physical) were prioritized based on the level of importance. Then, several measurable indicators have been selected and tested. The findings indicate an inequality among cities, especially the significant gap that exists between Bojnourd and other cities of the regions. Using change variance (CV) model and marking Z of the cities in the region, it is determined that the Bojnourd city itself is placed in first rank according to 6 criterions out of 10 selected criterions. Moreover, there is a clear gap between Bojnourd with Z value equals to 8.57. Second city of the region is Shirvan, with amount of Z equals to 3.54. Thus, t he findings reveal that the most significant influence of country divisions on the regional-urban space in Northern Khorasan was in 2004.These effects have been more obvious on the primary urban phenomenon. The research has been carried out using rank-size model showing that Bojnourd with its official-political function has strengthened its centrality and experienced the structural changes more tangible than other cities in the province.

Polarization of land use in cities plays a significant role in the importance of the different city zoning. Administrative land uses can be identified as the effective uses in cities. Such land uses attempt to get located in expensive parts of cities from the very beginning step, but after locating they would turn into a factor to attract other Organizations. In addition, each one of key service organizations in cities attempt to do city zoning based on special standards which, in many cases, are overlapping and may cause some problems. Present research paper is determined to scrutinize the polarization of land uses in city and also the importance of overlapped areas of five organizations involved in developmental and management issues of Rasht (departments of power, gas, water and water waste, telecommunication and municipality). It is based on the importance of their organization applying their documentary and survey studies. Therefore, the required databases in GIS environment was created. Moreover, current situation of different city zoning was drawn and analyzed. After that, overlapped areas were identified and the available layer of administrative centers were provided using statistical block data of 2011. The data were compared with the layer of administrative overlapped zones. AHP method was used to rate the bureaus in overlapped zones.Besides, polarization of land uses was performed using Entropy model and ArcGIS software. The findings indicate that the centers of state government-governance, management of bank branches and justice department are considered to be more significant than other administrative centers. Furthermore, zones of 2, 3, 10, 17 and 35 have the most accumulated offices among other overlapped centers. Also, service land uses and municipality have the highest focus and state government-governance, while justice department and roads and urban development have the least focus among other administrative centers.

Reliable water supply is one of the main challenges of this century. One of the ways of water supply is inter-basin water transfer schemes which can be useful in some cases and could save the destination basin. One of the projects, discussed recently, is water transfer project from Zab River basin to Urmia Lake. This study made an attempt to utilize the opinions of one hundred relevant experts and authorities to predict the positive and negative logistical consequences of this transfer in the basin of origin and destination by the statistical analysis of Multivariate linear regression. The results of linear regression model showed that due to the weight of standardized coefficients of the examined factors (B2), negative socio-cultural consequences of (0.328), negative economic consequences of (0.249), positive economic outcome of (0.216), negative environmental consequences of (0.210), negative political and security consequences of (0.174), positive environmental impact of (0.156), positive outcome of the political-security of (0.087), and the positive outcome of socio-cultural of (0.070), are the most possible consequences of transferring water from Zab to Urmia Lake respectively. According to experts, the interesting and significant point is that water transport in terms of environmental issues cannot save Urmia Lake and may act as an antidote. The results of structural equation modeling on each of the components of the implementation plan showed that among the positive consequences; environmental factors with the effect of (.85), and among the negative consequences; socio-cultural factors with the effect of (1.10) have the highest impact on water transport.

The domain of wind erosion is wider than the other erosion processes, so the use of regional models is inevitable to estimate its intensity. The experimental models depend on components rated in defined ranges evaluating the amount of erosion. Different experiences and also variety of input components of the model lead to some inconsistency in the results, and decline the reliability of estimation. The aim of this study is to optimize the estimation of wind erosion in Birjand plain through removal and mitigation of the effects of different rating experiences.In this paper, the data obtained from the experimental model of Iranian Research Institute of Forest and Rangeland (IRIFR) are optimized using collective intelligence artificial bee colony algorithm. To achieve this purpose, after calculating the components of Iranian research institute of forest and rangeland model, the investigated area was divided into pixels of 200×200m. The pixels were located into 82 subdomains by using polar coordinates in order to decrease the computational time. Then optimization of bee colony algorithm was implemented in three steps: (1) the allocation process, (2) the investigation process and (3) conclusion process by the bees. Finally the pixels with greatest potential erosion were identified. About 49% of the area of wind erosion classes in IRIFR model moved to higher erosion classes in bee colony algorithm. Therefore bee colony algorithm is highly sensitive in the classification of wind erosion. The variance test of the erosion classes obtained by the two methods showed more reliability of bee colony results. The results showed the highest erosion rates occurred in the alluvial fan landforms and more than 90 percent of erosion centers are located in the pediment of geomorphologic unit.

Despite the crucial role of rural areas in producing raw materials, there have always been a number of serious problems bothering this community. Unfortunately, environmental challenges have been affecting different aspects of rural life having the ability to destroy their life. The present qualitative study focuses on environmental challenges of Bdrabad (Located in the Rawansar township in Kermanshah Province) trying to identify the effects of these challenges. was selected people in the study Purposive sampling and needed information Were collected through In-depth interview and The focus groups in two steps (First, identify environmental challenges and secondly, Identify the effects of environmental challenges to the villagers). For data collection, at first, some meeting groups were arranged (5 focus groups with 6 to 9), then there were 19 direct observations and 14 individual interviews. Moreover, as the second step, there were 15 direct observations and 17 individual interviews.3 centered groups with 6 to 11 participants per group. Grounded theory method was applied to analyze the data. The results showed that the most important environmental challenges in the village of Bdrabad are considered as destruction of meadows, reduced water resources, the disappearance of wildlife, garbage and waste, air pollution, soil erosion, the destruction of forest trees, problems arising from the use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers and infrastructure management problems. The findings also revealed that the most important effects of environmental challenges to the rural area are regarded loss of livestock and poultry, economic challenges, threaten food security, challenges relating to employment, changes in cropping pattern and psychological challenges and health.

Spatial distribution of soil macro-fauna and vegetation are controlled by several parameters. Distribution pattern of these variables have many variations. In current study, auto-correlation function and fractal theory were used to evaluate spatial variability of tree canopy and soil macro fauna diversity in Riparian Forest of Maroon River in Khuzestan. In this research, soil macro fauna were sampled using 175 sampling point along parallel transects (perpendicular to the river). The distance between transects was 100 m. We considered the distance between samples as 50 m. soil macro fauna was extracted from 50 cm×50 cm×10 cm soil monolith by hand-sorting procedure.Evenness (Sheldon index), richness (Menhinick index) and diversity (Shannon H’index) were determined in each sample. Tree canopy was measured in 5* 5 plots.The results showed that none of the variables had autocorrelation confirming lack of their significant spatial structure. The study of distribution and fractal behavior of variables showed intensive variability in the study area and spatial variability did not have remarkable structure. Fractal dimension of both variables also were high.

The study of replacing fossil fuels with clean and renewable energies is growing over the world and exploitation of these sustainable energy sources is of special importance due to environmental necessities and diversify the sources of energy used. The present study aimed to determine wind energy potential and check if there are any possible optimal locations in order to exploit sustainable wind energy using statistics of synoptic stations in Hamadan province. In this study, initially, three-hour long-term data of wind speed and direction were evaluated using the synoptic stations statistics in Hamedan province during a five-year period. Then, Annual Wind Rose graph was drawn. After that, different distributions were tested for fitting wind data. Experimental probability of data was calculated using selected distribution. The results showed that in Hamedan station, Weibull and in Nojeh, Nahavand and Tuyserkan stations, inverse Gaussian distribution are the most accurate distributions in predicting the possibilities of wind speed. Also the wind power density at the maximum possible height for using wind power was calculated 15.24, 21.7, 10.8 and 6.3 watts per square meter in Hamadan, Nojeh, Skinheads and Tuyserkan stations respectively. According to the results, none of the obtained figures is desirable compared with the necessary standards for constructing wind power plants. Due to the number of wind blowing hours and necessary wind existence percentage between start and stop speeds of wind turbines, wind energy exploitation in of the surveyed stations is not cost-effective, therefore, they are not recommended.