Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
PADDY AND WATER ENVIRONMENT, cilt.2026, ss.1-2, 2026 (SCI-Expanded)
The frequency and severity of floods and droughts have increased due to
climate change, along with mismanagement, and increasing demand for
water resources due to population growth. Due to this increasing demand,
dependence on groundwater resources has been needed unprecedentedly. In
addition, overuse and unsustainable irrigation have severely stressed
groundwater, which is a limited resource. This study has been used
multi-criteria decision-making methods to determine the spatio-temporal
variation of groundwater potential zones for ensuring effective
groundwater management and security. Geographic Information Systems
(GIS) and Remote Sensing (RS) technologies are used to integrate 10
thematic layers, i.e., precipitation, soil, geology, elevation,
lineament density, slope, drainage density, land use/land cover (LULC),
topographic wetness index (TWI), and topographic roughness index (TRI).
The groundwater potential areas, with a high spatial resolution of 10 m,
were delineated using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Fuzzy
Analytic Hierarchy Process (Fuzzy-AHP) in the study area of the Harran
Plain, Türkiye. The integrity of the mapped potential zones was
authenticated by well measurements and application of the Receiver
Operating Characteristic (ROC) analysis, which yielded an Area Under
Curve (AUC) value of 72.7% for AHP and significantly improved 97.6% for
Fuzzy-AHP. The results obtained have significant implications for future
efforts in mapping areas critical for sustainable groundwater use,
agricultural irrigation, watershed management, and research on the
relationship between groundwater dynamics and climate change,
particularly in arid and semi-arid regions.