Water Crisis Analysis Using GIS; Case Study: Nishabur Plain, Iran

Water crisis as one of the most important environmental hazards has environmental, social and economical impacts. Researchers have adopted different methodologies and approaches including water balance equations, climatic changes effects and land use planning in the study of water crisis. In this study, Geographic Information System (GIS) techniques were employed to analyze the situation of Nishabur Plain (NE of Iran) and discuss the management of water crisis in the study area. For this propose, various data layers including precipitation and evapotranspiration rate, water table and groundwater exploitation, groundwater drowdown, permeability and land use layers were prepared. After weighting the gathered data based on their importance in water crisis with ranking method, GIS overlay function was used to produce the water crisis map. The result of this study indicates that the whole plain is confronting with water crisis of different severity level. The most important factor affecting the existing water crisis is the quality of cultivation for agricultural purposes. So, in order to reduce the gravity of water crisis, the necessity of new administrative strategies including the improvement of some land use classes and the cultivation of species with lower water need was highlighted.