Degree of Master of

Thesis structure

The thesis consists of seven chapters. The first introduction chapter considers background of the Aydar-Arnasay lakes system and defines the main goal and objectives of the present research. The second chapter reviews the existing academic discourse of the development of these lakes, including overview of the hydrological research conducted, assessment of the AALS ecological conditions and evolution of fish farming. Besides, this chapter describes contemporary ICTs as a tool for assisting environmental science. The third methodological chapter describes different techniques that have been employed during the

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research. The fourth chapter analyzes the Aydar-Arnasay lakes past in terms of examination of the historical development stages. Also, this chapter contains description of the practical exercise aimed to analyze change dynamics of the AALS hydrological parameters using GIS methods. The fifth chapter explores the present state of the Aydar-Arnasay lakes in the context of socio-economic and environmental aspects. The sixth research chapter consists of three main sections. The first section is devoted to the elaboration of the water management scenarios. The second one introduces the Chardara – Aydar-Arnasay model and its main characteristics. The third one describes the simulation of the model for testing the elaborated water management scenarios, conducting experiments and results interpretation. The main discussion and concluding points are provided in the last, seventh chapter.

2. LITERATURE REVIEW

The following chapter attempts to review literature related to the research conducted of the Aydar-Arnasay lakes system (AALS) and consider some successful examples of modern technologies and the methods utilized to carry out research of aquatic systems and other water-related issues. The literature review consists of three main sections.
The first section explains the main preconditions of the Aydar-Arnasay lakes formation,
i.e. the Aral Sea crisis and its major consequences and disintegration of the USSR as a significant aspect in development of this lakes system.
The second section examines the Aydar-Arnasay lakes as a new subject of scientific inquiry. This section includes the overview of the AALS research conducted, i.e. consideration of the hydrological, hydrochemical and hydrobiological conditions of these lakes, including the main components of the AALS salt balance, mineralization. Besides, this section depicts the evolution of the AALS fish industry, i.e. fisheries development in the period of 1960-1990 and the AALS fisheries fate after the collapse of the USSR.
The third section considers the review of modern technologies broadly applied in environmental science, namely, environmental modeling combining with scenario approach, use of geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing. Moreover this section specifies many current examples demonstrating a worldwide and successful use of these methods.

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It should be emphasized that because the Aydar-Arnasay lakes are relatively new human-induced system not so much scientific research has been conducted and not so many books, reports and articles concerning this topic have been published. For this reason, searching and analyzing of the existing information and data about the lakes system concerned was a quite complicated task for the author.
The most of the reports published concerning the Aydar-Arnasay lakes merely provide a brief explanation of their formation, shortly examine the major ecological features of this system and explain the main causes of environmental problems such as increase of mineralization and reduction of fish reproduction. We should pay attention that neither a deep scientific research nor the fresh journal articles and reports are existed at present time. Therefore, it is difficult to provide the current chapter with detailed and particular information about this lakes system.
Due to lack of deep information about the Aydar-Arnasay Lakes system in the English language, numerous scientific materials in Russian, including national reports, journal articles, archival materials, conference papers, and online databases have been used for writing of this chapter. The present chapter is a result of careful translation and compilation of the existing research conducted about the Aydar-Arnasay lakes; therefore, it has a high value in terms of the detailed review of this lakes’ system in the English language.

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