Foresight Modeling of Biodiversity and Water Resources Using Advanced Remote Sensing Analyses within the Framework of Sustainable Land-Use Planning

Land-use planning in the contemporary era faces mounting challenges in the simultaneous management of water resources and biodiversity. Population growth, climate change, unregulated urban expansion, and unsustainable exploitation of natural resources have led to the degradation of both the quantity and quality of water resources and a severe decline in biodiversity indicators in sensitive regions. Conventional land-use planning models have typically focused either on water resources or on biodiversity, rarely analyzing these two critical domains in an integrated and forward-looking manner. This article proposes a novel, integrated framework for foresight modeling of biodiversity and water resources in land-use planning processes. The framework is based on extensive remote sensing data and advanced spatial analyses, which, without costly field surveys, enable long-term monitoring of changes and the detection of hidden patterns. In the proposed model, selected biodiversity indicators (such as vegetation cover, species distribution indices, and habitat status) and water resource indicators (including availability, quality, and sustainability of flows and aquifers) are derived from multispectral and radar satellite imagery. These are then integrated into a composite "ecosystem resilience" index through advanced algorithms for spatial data classification, prediction, and fusion. By designing forward-looking scenarios (climate change, population pressure, infrastructure development), the future status of this index at various spatial scales is simulated and sensitivity and priority maps are generated. The innovation of this study lies in the simultaneous integration of two principal dimensions of land-use planning-water resources and biodiversity-and the prediction of future trends using open-access data and modern analytical tools, producing outputs that are understandable, transparent, and operational for engineers and decision-makers. Results from applying the proposed model to a sample watershed demonstrate that critical future areas, regions with potential for conservation or restoration, and sustainable development pathways can be identified with high accuracy. Based on the findings, the formulation of operational policies such as delineating suitable zones for economic activities, water resource management, and habitat protection-becomes more precise and reliable. The proposed framework is also continuously updatable with new data and scalable to other regions of the country, offering an operational model for agencies responsible for land-use planning and natural resource management.

کلیدواژه ها:

Sustainable Land-Use Planning ، Biodiversity ، Water Resources ، Remote Sensing ، Foresight Modeling