LAUSR

Climate change in arid areas leads to intensive drought, which causes widespread degradation in wetland ecosystems. Since wetlands play an important role in the sustainability of arid regions, climate change adaptation measures are required to conserve wetlands. However, how can we determine the regions that need increased adaptation measures? This paper aims to respond to this question and determine the regions that were highly degraded after climate change to consider them as high priority for adaptation measures. To reach this goal, degradation in the main factors that affect the functions of the Hamoun wetlands was detected in two periods, including wetland a one-year inundation period and over a 40-year period. The Hamoun wetlands are dealing with intensive drought because of the climate change that dries out these wetlands in some months and some years. Landsat images were classified using a support vector machine (SVM) in both the one-year inundation period and over 40 years to determine the regions that lost water and vegetation cover. The degradation of water bird habitat was also determined over both periods. The multicriteria evaluation (MCE) method was applied to overlay the layers and prioritize the regions for adaptation measures based on the degradation criteria. The two important contributions of this paper include introducing a functional method for the implementation of adaptation measures and running this method by the main components shared between all wetlands, which makes this method applicable in all regions.