Abstract
Due to numerous droughts in recent years, the amount of surface water in arid and semi-arid regions has decreased significantly, so reliance on groundwater to meet local and regional demands has increased. The Kabgian watershed is a karst watershed in southwestern Iran that provides a significant proportion of drinking and agriculture water supplies in the area. This study identified areas with karst groundwater potential using a combination of machine learning and statistical models, including entropy-SVM-LN, entropy-SVM-SG, and entropy-SVM-RBF. To do this, 384 karst springs were identified and mapped. Sixteen factors that are related to karst potential were identified from a review of the literature, and these were compiled for the study area. The 384 locations were randomly separated into two categories for training (269 location) and validation (115 location) datasets to be used in the modeling process. The ROC curve was used to evaluate the modeling results. The models used, in general, were good at determining the location of karst groundwater potential. The evaluation showed that the E-SVM-RBF model had an area under the curve of 0.92, indicating that it was most accurate estimator of groundwater potential among the ensemble models. Evaluation of the relative importance of each of the 16 factors revealed that land use, a vector ruggedness measure, curvature, and topography roughness index were the most important explainers of the presence of karst groundwater in the study area. It was also found that the factors affecting the presence of karst springs are significantly different from non-karst springs.
Highlights
In recent decades, reduced availability of water in alluvial sediments and the increasing demand for water has led to increased exploitation of groundwater in hard rock and calcareous geological formations
This study evaluated the ability of data-mining models to predict areas of groundwater potential in a karst region
The results showed that the factors that promote the presence of springs in the region are different from the factors that are known to predict the presence of springs in non-karst regions
Summary
In recent decades, reduced availability of water in alluvial sediments and the increasing demand for water has led to increased exploitation of groundwater in hard rock and calcareous geological formations. Due to their low salt content, hard rock formations yield water of good quality [1]. Such aquifers could help to provide water for drinking, agriculture, and industrial uses [2]. Limestone and dolomite formations can develop karst landscapes that contain fractures, voids, and conduits that can serve as aquifers. Fifteen to 25% of the world’s population depends on karst formations for fresh water [4]
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