Investigating the Impacts of Restoration Scenarios for Urmia Lake Using Predator-Prey System Dynamics Model

A system dynamic model is necessary to estimate the existing interactions between Urmia Lake and factors affecting it. In this study, the Predator-Prey model using system dynamics simulation has been developed for Urmia Lake Basin. The main advantage of this model is providing the balanced water allocation between stakeholders in order to have a sustainable water management system for the lake. Due to increasing the area of irrigated lands in the northwest of Iran, having an applicable and up-to-date method to reduce water consumption in agricultural part is unavoidable. A stock-flow model has been designed in this study, in which Urmia Lake and irrigated lands are considered as the prey and predator, respectively. Then, the effects of various factors on the water elevation fluctuations of the lake have been analyzed dynamically and the strategies for reducing the water consumption of agricultural part have been investigated carefully. The results of this study indicate that the reducing irrigated lands by 40%, improve irrigation efficiency by 21% and reducing the area of lake by 20% lead to increasing water level of the lake by 1.7, 0.8 and 0.5 meters, respectively. By applying these policies, the water level of the lake will increase about 4.3 meters and it will lead to better ecological condition.