Quantification of the impact of land-use/land-cover changes in the Irish river basins to the water quantity and quality parameters

Urbanization is the most rapid and intense global phenomenon across the majority of the developing and developed nations occurring recently. The migrating populations from the rural areas to urban areas leads to considerable change in the distribution of the existing Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) classes owing to an increased requirement in the number of houses, rapid industrialization, and lowering in agriculture and forest land. The intense expansion of the cities and urban areas brings substantial changes in the landscapes, which significantly impact the environment, society, and natural resources. This study investigates the historical changes in LULC at selected river basins across Ireland. Subsequently, a system dynamics model has been developed by considering three significant subsystems: land use, population, socio-economy. The developed model is used to obtain future projected LULC maps in those selected river basins in Ireland. The future projected LULC is subsequently integrated with the future projected climate change variables into a hydrological model to simulate water quantity and water quality parameters in those Irish river basins. Finally, a comparative analysis is performed on the water-related parameters to investigate the changes in flooding scenarios and water quality indicators in the future due to LULC and climate changes in comparison to the historical and current period.