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SUMMARY
Soil erosion mirrors the complex interactions among living and non-living elements in a watershed system. Any type of imbalance in watershed components leads to unexpected and unwished outcomes causing loss of infrastructures and investments. Different figures from 0.8 to even 7 billion tones have been given on soil erosion rate in Iran, progressively increased during last decades. Untimely erosive rain, high potential sensitivity of resources, improper infrastructures development, land use changes, and unlawful/over exploitation of resources are the main reasons behind ever-increasing soil erosion. However, many attempts made by authorized organizations and agencies could simply brake down the high rate of the erosion. In the present article, it was aimed to report some managerial approaches for minimizing the soil erosion-related problems towards developing integrated watershed management approach in Iran.
Keywords: CoManagement Practice, Ecosystem Services, Land Use Planning, Sediment Yield
INTRODUCTION
Soil erosion is a very complicated process mirrors the resultant of complicated interactions among many existing factors in a watershed system. Elucidating soil erosion phenomenon and magnitude can therefore represents balance level in the watershed systems and provides a useful index of land degradation, soil erosion severity and trends. Accurate estimates of sediment yield and its temporal variation are needed for various purposes, including the design of impoundments and erosion control structures, river morphological computations, and evaluation studies of the effects of various land use management practices (Kothyari et al., 1997; Lana-Renault et al., 2007; Emadodin et al., 2012; Eskandarie, 2012; Zakerinejad and Maerker, 2015).
There are many controlling factors on the severity and extension the soil erosion many of which either originates or accelerates by the human (Hudson and Alcantara-Ayala, 2006; Sadeghi et al., 2008; Sadeghi, 2009; Emadodin et al., 2012). In the present paper, an attempt is firstly made to minutely picture and elaborate the existing problems in the country. Some scientific reports on drastic changes in sediment fluxes due to natural and human induced factors will also be presented. The appropriate solutions will also be presented to combat or minimize the problems towards developing effective sediment management strategies.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Soil Erosion in Iran
Collecting an appropriate data set on soil erosion is essential to draw the sustainable managerial strategies for a watershed management, since soil erosion stands at...