Watershed Health (Part three): Vigor, Organization and Resilience Conceptual Model

The increasing interest of world researchers and policy makers to sustainable development concept as well as excessive increaseing in population, degradation and overuse of natural resourcesconfirmed the necessity of the ecosystem health assessment. It is very important to help planners and managers country wide toward increasing the watershed sustainability and optimizing the use of available resources. Nowadays, ecosystem health has been concerned a lot and become an important index of regional sustainable development for managers and decision makers. Several approaches have been recommended for ecosystem health assessment. One of these approaches is indicator-based conceptual models. Accordingly, the objective of this study is to introduce vigor, organization and resilience (VOR) model for assessing ecosystem health through the simultaneous integration of qualitative and quantitative analyses. This model has been well considered by USA, China, India, Canada and Australia for watershed health assessment, but has not been yet considered in Iran. Due to the rapid growth of the industrial activities and the bad management of agricultural land in Iran, the ecosystem is gradually deteriorating, which makes it important to assess the ecosystem health and take measures to restore the damaged ecosystem towards adaptive management planning.