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Lake Urmia is a thalassohaline ecosystem. It is an extremely simple ecological pyramid. This makes it a very sensitive ecosystem. This ecosystem has been facing various threats regarding the amount of water released from the associated basin. To calculate the lake water requirement with an ecological approach, we identified three variables: ecology, water quality, and water quantity indices as environmental indicators. The ecological index represented by Artemia urmiana is considered as an independent variable; while, the water quality index represented by concentration of NaCl, and the water quantity index represented by water elevation are regarded as dependent variables. The salinity... 

The main objective of this paper is to provide comparative quantitative examinations on the capabilities of two-dimensional horizontal and pseudo-three-dimensional (3D) modelling approaches for simulating spatial and temporal variability of the flow and salinity in Lake Urmia, Iran. The water quality in the lake has been an environmentally important subject partly because this shallow hypersaline aquatic ecosystem is considered to be one of the largest natural habitats of a unique multicellular organism, Artemia urmiana. This brine shrimp is the major food source for many of the protected and rare shorebirds that visit the lake. A.urmiana can grow and survive in certain ranges of salinity,...