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Persistent pressures that relate to nonstationary climate variations and land use/cover changes (LULCC) keep affecting water resources and their associated environmental services with increasing impact trends worldwide. Lake Marmara, located in Gediz River Basin in Western Turkey, is already considered among the environmentally degraded water resources while counted with a priority wetland due to historical habitats and ecosystem functions. The region is remarkably threatened to its extinction under the combined impacts of both climate and LULCC related concerns. While intensive agricultural practices around the region deplete the lake's inflow sources, low levels of the lake water provide breeding ground for various algae types and cause eutrophication and related massive fish population decreases, in a way restricting local communities' access to fundamental ecosystem services for their survivability. The study investigates the effects of LULCC in the example of Lake Marmara in an environmental scope and provides water balance modelling that is utilized to help examine hydrologic conditions of the lake. Future LULCC and water balance projections are also incorporated to evaluate probable views in near future ahead with the main target of providing a valuable tool for the decision and policy making processes.

Land use and land cover change (LULCC) is considered one of the major drivers of climate change, although climate change can also foster direct or indirect influences leading to LULCC. The objective of the presented study is to offer a strategic observation frame as the land use and land cover (LULC) transitions are grouped to define the cover flows (CFs). The Küçük Menderes River Basin (KMRB), which is located in the west of Turkey was examined as the case study. Through LULCC modelling via the employment of multi-layer perceptron (MLP), cellular automata (CA), and Markov Chain methods, future LULC maps were projected up to the horizon of 2050. Hydrologic responses of the basin to LULCC were determined by the developed hydrologic model, which is generated by the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT). The superimposed impacts of the examined effects of LULCC have been investigated by the CF types. This way, the individual impacts of the CFs have been assessed. In the case of the KMRB, projected annual runoffs for the year 2050 cover map represent a 9.06% reduction and the major responsible CF type for this reduction is the conversion from forest to non-irrigated agricultural land cover by 22.90%.