Master thesis

Robert Schlick (2019)
Visualizing the MAR potential for Africa through GIS-MCDA and web-based tool design. Master thesis, Technische Universität Dresden, May 2019

Abstract

Water scarcity is still a significant problem in large parts of the world. Climate change and growing population even worsen the situation, especially in regions that have always suffered from difficult climatic conditions before. Extreme events such as droughts and floods are becom- ing more frequent but also desertification, scarcity of food and drinking water, salination and degradation of soils. The African continent offers many examples of these problems. A large part of Africa’s population lives from agriculture and is thus massively affected by the problems described above.

One possible approach to deal with these problems, especially in the small-scale sector, is managed aquifer recharge (MAR). In times of high water availability, water can be temporar- ily stored as groundwater using various methods and above all in a relatively inexpensive and straightforward way in order to make it usable again later in times of water scarcity. Other MAR methods can even support water treatment processes by filtering the water through the soil material and pumping it back to the surface elsewhere.
MAR is already used in many places, but has even more potential, especially for arid and semi-arid areas. In order to find places that are appropriate for the establishment of MAR projects, suitability maps will be prepared. These maps usually show the area of interest in a colour scale that makes it easy to see how well an area section is suited or not for the problem defined beforehand. The process to create such a map is called GIS-based multi-criteria decision analysis (GIS-MCDA). So far, there are only a few tools that simplify this process for users. Most of this thesis consists of developing such a tool and making it accessible to decision makers, scientists, and organizations around the world. A web-based solution was developed and has been integrated into the existing INOWAS platform. The functionality of the website was tested within this work on the example of Southern Africa and compared and verified with results of the conventional method and already existing MAR facilities.