In recent years, the occurrence of floods is one of the most important challenges facing in Hamadan city. In the absence/inefficiency of urban drainage systems, rainwater harvesting (RWH) systems as low-impact development (LID) methods can be considered as a measure to reduce the floods. In this study, three scenarios concerning the RWH from the roof surfaces are studied to evaluate the type of the harvested water on reducing flooding. In the first scenario, which indicates the current situation in the studied area, it is indicated that there is no harvest of the roof surfaces in the studied area. The second scenario is about the use of water harvested from the roof surfaces for household purposes. The third scenario also refers to the use of harvested water for irrigation of gardens. The simulation results of these three scenarios using the Soil Conservation Service (SCS) method in the Hydrologic Modeling System (HEC-HMS) model reveal that if the second scenario is implemented, the runoff volume decreases from 28 to 12% for the return period from 2 to 100 years. However, in the third scenario, this reduction in runoff volume will be 48 and 27% for return periods of 2 to 100 years, respectively. Therefore, the results of this study indicate that the use of harvested water can also affect the reduction on runoff volume.

Watershed management practices (WMP) are widely used in catchments as a measure to reduce soil erosion and sediment-related problems. We used a paired catchment in the Gonbad region of Hamadan province, Iran, to evaluate sediment yield response to watershed management practices (WMP) by employing the concept of sediment connectivity (SC). To do this, the SC index as a representation of sediment yield was firstly simulated for the control catchment that there is no WMP. In the next step, the SC index was simulated for impacted catchment, including some WMP, i.e., seeding, pit-seeding, and exclosure. After assessing the accuracy of the produced SC maps using filed observations and erosion plots, the SC maps using quantile-quantile plot (Q-Q plot) were compared to achieve the role of WMP in reducing the rate of sediment yield. The Q-Q plot showed that there is a strong similarity between the SC of catchments, it can be concluded that the WMP has no significant impact on the reducing rate of the sediment yield in this study.