
Farshad AmiraslaniUniversity of Tehran | UT · Remote Sensing and GIS
Farshad Amiraslani
PhD
About
73
Publications
25,497
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
1,366
Citations
Publications
Publications (73)
Over the last two decades, Urmia Lake has lost 72.1% of its surface area and more than 90% of its water volume. This Lake is in danger of complete desication and becoming one of the most harmful sources of salt storms in the coming decade. In this research, the water balance of the Urmia Lake basin was investigated to detremine the minimum water le...
Climate change impacts occur at varying spatial scales requiring appropriately scaled responses. In impoverished rural areas, adapting to or mitigating the effects of climate change is challenging, with any short-term impairment to precarious livelihoods likely triggering negative community responses even if people are aware of long-term benefits....
Using rock art conservation as a focus, this paper outlines the levels of legislated protection afforded to designated natural and cultural areas/sites in Australia and describes the co-management approach adopted in 1998 in relation to Mutawintji National Park in western New South Wales. The park encompasses four different protection categories: a...
This review paper investigates unprecedented recent investment and capital spending in cross-provincial water management and transfer infrastructure in Iran. Although numerous cross-provincial water transfer plans have been implemented in the country, the scale, approach, and stakeholders involved in this recent national plan are unprecedented. Thi...
Water resources are the most contentious, scarce, and contestable natural resources at any geographical scale. Where water resources cross international boundaries, additional uncertainties arise for access to and distribution of available water. Here, we examined three transnational water partnerships by focusing on Iran as a dryland country with...
History has witnessed a long-term relationship between humans and animals. Historical documents and modern findings prove that humans’ needs to use animals for companions or services are commonplace in many parts of the world, leading to the domestication of certain animals. Yet, modern societies have degraded many natural habitats for wildlife, co...
Over the past two centuries, Iranian agricultural policy and practice have been developed dramatically, mostly in response to population growth, gradual improvements in technology and science, several revolutions, one major war and recent international sanctions. Until the mid-20th Century, Iran was an agrarian society, barely distinguishable from...
Soil organic carbon sequestration has received increasing attention due to the important benefits it can have for ecosystem services and in particular food production, climate change mitigation and adaptation. Indeed, soils rich in organic carbon are, in general, more fertile and support plant growth better than carbon-depleted soils. On the other...
The 1969 UN Report “Problems of the Human Environment” was a seminal work that first highlighted environmental problems at a global scale. This report underpinned a series of subsequent international summits and conventions of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit and the subsequent three global conventions on Biodiversity, Climate Change and Desertification....
Time flies, as CO2 and global temperatures continue to rise rapidly. We can no longer rely on expensive and unachievable or long-delayed new technologies, requiring investment and development to reduce carbon emissions in future decades. Current geopolitical uncertainties are looming while climate change and food insecurity are increasing, and the...
Soils have recently received attention in the policy area due to their various connections to climate change, human health and their key role in sustaining human societies in general. In this context, agricultural production and healthy nutritious food are linked to soil health and the diversity of their (micro-)biome, which depend on organic carbo...
Urbanisation has become a challenge as the urban population grows while cities’ land areas, amenities, and green spaces have remained relatively unchanged or even declined. While urban areas are growing, the link between humans and nature is fading. Increasingly, cities are being affected by climate change impacts and so, the role of media in provi...
Documents are tools of communication which are changing rapidly in nature and quantity. Prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic, digital formats have become ubiquitous. However, documents and documentation have a long pre-digital history. In seeking to survey document types and features, two major online journal databases from the Web of Science database...
The indirect rainfall estimates by satellites and numerical models are the alternative options for the regions lacking enough and accurate ground observations. However, these indirect estimates often lack homogeneity and need to be evaluated before application. This study used gauge observations to test the accuracy of recently produced high-resolu...
Tehran's demography and urbanization have undergone dramatic changes since its designation as the capital city over two centuries ago. Currently, the city possesses 22 districts and a few associated regions (cemetery and southern suburbs).
We considered and developed 11 indicators to evaluate the quality of life of Tehran using Structured Query Lan...
Stakeholders are individuals and organizations, permanent or on an ad hoc, who are involved or affected by the project's execution or completion. Projects involve various primary and secondary stakeholders with different opinions, objectives and contributions. For any project's success, the interest of the project stakeholders must be understood.
T...
Drought is a climatological phenomenon that occurs across all climate zones of the world. It causes environmental
and economic loss and can negatively affect agricultural profit, especially in dry and semi-arid areas. This study
used the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) to model
drought impact...
This research paper investigates the general understanding and skills of young third-year environmental engineering students concerning the criteria for monitoring wetlands. Students were asked to describe approaches, data, and final solutions to identify and/or eliminate wetland odor. Over half of the students (55%) did not consider the “identific...
Drought is a climatological phenomenon that occurs across all climate zones of the world. It causes environmental and economic loss and can negatively affect agricultural profit, especially in dry and semi-arid areas. This study used the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) to model drought impact...
Despite the paramount role of drylands in supporting people’s livelihoods and rendering ecosystem services, legislation on Environmental Impact Assessment has been introduced belatedly after several decades. By exemplifying Iran, the author proposes two main reasons for such a delayed action. First, drylands are misleadingly considered as barren la...
The recent COVID-19 pandemic has revealed flaws in rural settings where most people live without the necessary tools, income, and knowledge to tackle such unprecedented global challenges. Here, I argue that despite the research studies conducted on rural areas, these have not solved rising rural issues, notably poverty and illiteracy. I propound a...
Human response to wildlife management is widespread, encompassing both human–wildlife conflicts and wildlife conservation, in different places and at different times. As people become increasingly aware of the importance of wildlife to biological and environmental sustainability, newspapers can be important sources of information, especially in dev...
This paper is a first attempt to compute the total water needs of an agricultural plain with remote sensing and ground data in Iran. The cropping areas were mapped with Sentinels-2 images, based on NDVI profiles classification. This model was validated and 85% of the areas were correctly classified. Second, the crop water needs were computed using...
Water is a valuable resource for which demand often exceeds supply in dry climates. Managing limited water resources becomes increasingly difficult in circumstances of recurring drought, rising populations, rapid urbanisation, industrial development, and financial constraints, such as occur in Iran. Newspapers both report on and influence people’s...
Iran is one of the countries with the highest number of the cases of capital relocation throughout its history. During the past four centuries, at least, six different cities have played the role of the capital for the country. This paper examines the most recent push for the capital relocation in Iran. By examining the public debate over the topic...
A major challenge for any dryland country affected by climate change, like Iran, is exploring the ways to cope with low and scattered precipitation while conserving fragile ecosystems. Extensive extraction of underground water and frequent severe droughts have compounded water scarcity both temporally and spatially. Therefore, the relevant importan...
Background and Objectives: Soils are the largest carbon pool in terrestrial ecosystems, which account for the greatest amount of the global total terrestrial carbon stocks. Accurate mapping of Soil Organic Carbon (SOC) spatial distribution is a key assumption for soil resource management and environmental protection. The rapid development...
Anthropogenic industrial dust decreases productivity and slows down the growth of plants. Quantifying the effects of industrial dust on vegetation and determining the distance over which factories scatter dust are of paramount importance for biodiversity conservation and sustaining ecosystem services. This study aims at quantifying the effect of du...
Aquifer storage and recovery (ASR) with treated wastewater, is considered as an effective solution for a critical aquifer decline due to groundwater overexploitation. In ASR operational step and after the aquifer storage phase, the problem is the new groundwater right for stakeholders and specifically farmers. In a 2-year study, the potential of a...
Climate change adaptation, mitigation and food security may be addressed at the same time by enhancing soil organic carbon (SOC) sequestration through environmentally sound land management practices. This is promoted by the ‘‘4 per 1000’’ Initiative, a multistakeholder platform aiming at increasing SOC storage through sustainable practices. The sci...
Flooding is one of the most problematic natural events affecting urban areas. In this regard, developing flooding models plays a crucial role in reducing flood-induced losses and assists city managers to determine flooding-prone areas (FPAs). The aim of this study is to investigate on the prediction capability of fuzzy analytical hierarchy process...
The main problem using meteorological drought indices include inappropriate distribution of meteorological stations. Satellite data have reliable spatial and temporal resolution and provide valuable information used in many different applications. The Standardized precipitation index has several advantages. The SPI is based on rainfall data alone a...
The Pars Special Economic Energy Zone (PSEEZ) is the largest global special economic zone in the field of oil, gas, and petrochemical industry. The Nayband national marine park is located in the PSEEZ and mangrove forests are spread throughout the estuaries (Bidkhun or Asaloyeh, Basatin and Haleh) of the park. Despite important goods and ecosystem...
Introduction
Ecosystem services are the benefits people get from ecosystems and human always needs ecosystem services and products for survival. These services are divided into four categories of productive, regulatory, cultural and life support services; the first three categories are directly affecting people, and the fourth one is critical for t...
Drought refers to a complex natural disaster that causes serious environmental, social, and economic impacts worldwide. The impacts of drought can be modeled by some factors such as precipitation, temperature, groundwater level, surface water status, and vegetation conditions. The relationship between rainfall and vegetation indices was analyzed to...
We investigated the simultaneous and sympatric movements of a coalition of two Asiatic Cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus venaticus) and a Persian Leopard (Panthera pardus saxicolor), two rare and highly mobile large felids in Bafq Protected Area, Iran. The animals were tracked with GPS collars for 4.5 to 9 months at a temporal resolution of eight hours. T...
Response to “The “4p1000” initiative: A new name should be adopted” by Baveye and White (2019)
Based on remotely sensed imagery and socioeconomic data, this research analyzes the reasons why farmers choose one crop over another in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon. This study mapped the area of the cultivated crop in 2017 with Sentinel-2 images. An accurate and new method was developed to extract the field boundaries from the evolution of the norm...
Take these eight steps to make soils more resilient to drought, produce more food and store emissions, urge Cornelia Rumpel and colleagues. Take these eight steps to make soils more resilient to drought, produce more food and store emissions, urge Cornelia Rumpel and colleagues.
حرکت نسبی جانوران شکارگر نسبت به طعمه، برای موفقیت شکارگر و طعمه کلیدی است. داده حرکت همزمان و هم بوم شکارگر و طعمه بسیار نایاب بوده و دادهکاوی حرکت فوق، پیچیدگیهای موضوعی و موضعی بسیار دارد. دادهکاوی و آمار مکانی ابزارهای لازم برای تحلیل حرکت را فراهم میکند. در این تحقیق به تحلیل محدوده اقامت، رفتار حرکت و همکنش دو گونه نایاب و در خطر انقراض...
Iran faces environmental challenges such as erosion and extreme events, namely droughts and floods. These phenomena have frequently affected the country over the past decades and temperature rise has led to a more challenging situation. Iran started to implement national and provincial policies in the 1950s to cope with these phenomena. To provide...
As the first-ever report in Iran, this paper explores the styles, tones, subjects, and patterns of the coverage of environmental news published in two Iranian newspapers. Involving certain initiatives and advantages in analysing newspapers, our research used the Structural Query Language (SQL) database management system to retrieve and manage data....
This study was carried out to evaluate possible improvements of the soil moisture (SM) retrievals from the SMAP observations, based on the synergy between SMAP and SMOS. We assessed the impacts of the vegetation and soil roughness parameters on SM retrievals from SMAP observations. To do so, the effects of three key input parameters including the v...
The objective of this study was to exploit the synergy between SMOS and SMAP based on vegetation optical depth (VOD) to improve brightness temperature (TB) simulations and land surface soil moisture (SM) retrievals in arid regions of the world. In the current operational algorithm of SMAP (level 2), vegetation water content (VWC) is considered as a...
The objective of this study was to exploit the synergy between SMOS and SMAP based on vegetation optical depth (VOD) to improve brightness temperature (TB) simulations and land surface soil moisture (SM) retrievals in arid regions of the world. In the current operational algorithm of SMAP (level 2), vegetation water content (VWC) is considered as a...
The 4p1000 initiative aims to promote soil organic carbon (SOC) sequestration as a means to mitigate climate change and to increase food security. The 4/1000 reference criteria’ are designed for the formative assessment of projects to meet the principles and goals of the Initiative as defined in the Paris Declaration and the UN Sustainable Developm...
We analyzed the movement behavior of a male Asiatic cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus venaticus), a critically endangered species, to understand its habitat preferences and relationship to its ambient environment. Using a hidden Markov chain approach, we identified distinct behavioral phases within the cheetah's movement track. We explored the conditions u...
In this paper we study the movement behavior of Asiatic cheetah Acinonyx jubatus venaticus, a highly endangered cat found in Iran. At first, we fitted the differenced correlated random walk model to the data to estimate the probability of the behavior of the animal in two distinctive states. The moving state can be interpreted as the state when the...
In this paper we study the movement behavior of Asiatic cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus venaticus), a highly endangered cat found in Iran. At first, we fitted the differenced correlated random walk model to the data to estimate the probability of the behavior of the animal in two distinctive states. The moving state can be interpreted as the state when t...
Complex interactions between human decision-makers and their biophysical environment
can be observed in land-use systems. These complexities are due to the differences
between biophysical and socio-economic variables. To Model human decision-making, we need to know the interactions between landscape, community, and ecosystems. In reality, humans...
The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) has lacked an efficient mechanism to access scientific knowledge since entering into force in 1996. In 2011 it decided to convene an Ad Hoc Working Group on Scientific Advice (AGSA) and gave it a unique challenge: to design a new mechanism for science-policy communication based on the...
To study desertification, we need to identify risk factors as well as their interactions with each
other in different time and places. In other words, reliable assessment, monitoring and displaying
of desertification problems, require an integrated analysis and simulation of the real world (Gross
et al. 2006). Intensive use of agricultural land is...
Deforestation is a problem in many developing countries. In Iran, the introduction of forestry management policies in the twentieth century coincided with a period of severe depletion in forest cover. This over-utilization resulted from tree cutting for road construction, the establishment of sawmills and match factories, and in particular, the gro...
Research on vegetation change, rangeland assessment or desertification modelling in drylands using remotely sensed image acquisition normally ignores long-term rainfall as a key criterion in image acquisition. This article will present a novel procedure for image acquisition to investigate vegetation change in a degraded rangeland located in Wester...
Arid and semi-arid lands have a variety of special natural features and vegetation types. Because of the fragile ecosystems of dry environments, a careful management should be considered there. In order to manage deserts, we should monitor some fundamental changes that occurred in these areas. Due to the extended desert lands and their harsh climat...
Desertification in Iran was recognized between the 1930s and 1960s. This paper traces Iran's attempts to reclaim desertified areas, evaluates the anti-desertification approaches adopted, and identifies continuing challenges. Iran has areas vulnerable to desertification due to extensive areas of drylands and increasing population pressure on land an...
This paper seeks to provide an overview of the relationships between food insecurity, land degradation and desertification, and its antithesis, food security and sustainable land management. It places particular focus on the world’s drylands (i.e. arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas), but situates the review within the wider context of global f...
This paper seeks to provide an overview of the relationships between food insecurity, land degradation and desertification, and its antithesis, food security and sustainable land management. It places particular focus on the world's drylands (i.e. arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas), but situates the review within the wider context of global f...
Anti-desertification planning in Iran operates at the national level through the Five Year Development Plans, the National Plan to Combat Desertification — a long-running scheme for which the Forest, Rangeland and Watershed Management Organisation (FRWO) is responsible — and the recently developed National Action Programme to Combat Desertification...
In order to study the relationship between vegetation and physico-chemical properties of soil of the margins of Tabas Kavir (salty desert), vegetation and soil components were surveyed. Regarding to the soil and vegetation distribution and land use in this region, four distinct areas were selected and classified covering all factors. Then, based on...
Soil organic matters are considered as the animal and plant residues and active components of soils. The cultivation practices will cause the quick removal of organic matters in soils even in those which are not affected by erosion. This study was carried out to assess the level of soil humus in the pilot area, to investigate the positive or negati...