JWSS - Journal of Water and Soil Science

In the recent decades, dams have paradoxically been considered as a constraint and or a driving force of surface water conservation. On the other hand, dams have had a number of socio-economic and environmental impacts, the main reason for conducting the current case study on Shah-Qasem Dam in Yasouj, Iran, was to employ the survey field research through a questionnaire to assess the rural peoples’ viewpoint; this was done in four villages of the Southern Sar’roud County. Based on the (Cochran) formula, 192 individuals were relatively selected from each village. According to the findings, the most important impact of the dam was mainly economical (the average impact was between 2.37 and 3.7), whereas the least one was environmental (the average impact was between 1.81 and 3.54). Also, the results of the hypotheses’ analyses by means of 2 and Wilcoxon showed the following results: rise of the villages’ income, increase of the cultivated farms, increase in the employed individuals, enhancement of the cultivated crops, the regions production rising, improved tourism, lack of people’s participation in the decision making process, and reaming of the same plant varieties in the area, as compared with the pre-dam era. It is worth considering, however, that based on the statistical population used, this study was concerned mainly with the short benefits of the dam, rather than its long-term destructive ones.

Drilling material from the tunnel of the Tehran-Shomal highway was estimated to be about 2.5 Million Cubic Meters by the project authorities. Sadly, from the beginning, the drilling materials had been deposited on the open space in the floodplain of the Chaloos river with slightest environmental considerations. During the previous years, weathering and leaching from the drilled materials besides the discharge of drain water from the tunnel had led to seriouse contaminations and the deterioration of the water quality of the Chaloos river. In this paper, the ecological risk of nonorganic pollutants due to drilled materials was investigated. The sampling was done from the excavated materials and river sediment in five different locations throughout a complete year. From the many pollutants, Nickel, Cadmium and Copper were chosen to be investigated. The results showed that almost 15 percent of the samples had a high degree of pollution, while 60 percent of them were clean and the other 25 percent included the highly contaminated ones. All samples were also estimated to have a low to high ecological risk.

In this study, the Drainmod-S model was used to vary soil salt concentration and the effect of underground drainage on the amount of leaching in a physical model (large lysimeter). A soil extractor was installed at depths of 40, 50, and 70 cm at a distance of 35 cm from the drainage to measure the salinity of the soil solution. In this study, three scenarios were applied including salinity profiles under conventional conditions (mid-season and end-season drainage), soil salinity profiles under different drainage conditions, and prior scenarios with saline irrigation. The second and third scenarios were applied in four drainage stages, respectively. These stages include transplanting and mid-season drainage (days 15 to 20), mid-season drainage (days 35 to 40), mid-season and end-season drainage (days 55 to 60), and end-season drainage (days 75 to 80). The results showed that after simulating the total solute concentration overtime at a depth of 40 cm and comparing it with the measured values, the coefficient of determination (R²) was 0.77 indicating an acceptable Drainmod-S model simulation. This parameter for simulating solute concentration at 50 and 70 cm depth was 0.76 and 0.75, respectively. The mean absolute error parameter (MAE) value was also negligible.