Using multi-criteria spatial analysis to identify potential water harvesting locations

Abstract

Water resources are one of the most important requirements for building societies and one of the basic components of development, especially in arid and semi-arid regions due to the limited rainfall and its distribution and the lack of water availability in light of the increasing population growth and the declining quality of water resources due to various pollution factors. Therefore, the integrated management of these resources has become extremely important to maintain water security in order to avoid future crises

resulting from water shortages in quantity and quality. From this standpoint, this research aims to find sources of water by exploiting the available surface runoff using water harvesting technology, by introducing a number of factors affecting water harvesting in the study area, which are: slope, rainfall, geological structures, soil, and drainages. Depending on the opinions of local experts, the importance (weight) of each influential factor was obtained through the hierarchical analysis method, and using geographic information system techniques, processing, analysis, and weighted linear combination of the maps representing these factors were carried out. As a result, a suitability map of water harvesting sites in the studied area was obtained, which was divided into three sectors (high, medium, low) after excluding inappropriate sites from the map such as wells, faults, and cities. The results reached through this research contribute to reduce the gap between available resources and the demand for them in order to achieve sustainable development of these resources