Publication

Abstract : Increasing population, urbanisation, and climate change have stressed our groundwater resources severely. This situation is especially true in the case of Ernakulam District of Kerala, one of the most urbanised regions in the state. The district houses many critical infrastructures and has a large population density. Moreover, the city sees increasing urbanisation and changing land patterns. These facts point towards the need for an effective Groundwater Potential (GWP) zone delineation to help policymakers and stakeholders plan and implement effective strategies for conserving and recharging groundwater areas. However, it is also of paramount importance to see how the changes occur to the Potential zones themselves to identify critical situations where immediate intervention is needed. Therefore, this study first creates the GWP zones of 2016 and 2021, and thematic change detection is done to understand the changes to each potential zone. The results show that the impoverished GWP zones are decreasing and moving towards the poor. At the same time, the exceptionally high potential zone areas are falling and moving towards high potential zones. The results also highlight the efficiency of integrating the Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) with remote sensing and GIS and could improve further research in groundwater delineation-based studies.