Responses of potential groundwater recharge zones to land use and land cover changes in semi-arid region: Case study of Black Volta Basin

The spatiotemporal variations in land use/land cover (LULC) significantly affect groundwater movement. Therefore, assessing the impact of LULC changes on recharge is crucial for sustainable groundwater resource management. This study aims to monitor the influence of LULC alterations on groundwater recharge zones in a semi-arid region. This study integrated the ‘fixing-changing’ method with GIS and the Analytic Hierarchical Process (AHP) to delineate groundwater recharge areas. Satellite images were utilised to evaluate patterns from 2000 to 2022. Results showed that from 2000 to 2022, settlement, croplands, water bodies, and closed savannah increased by 164.94 %, 172.272 %, 102.94 %, and 25.43 %, respectively. The legitimacy of the outcome was trained and tested by applying receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves, which revealed training and testing accuracies of 81.683% and 79.912%, respectively, indicating a very high correlation between the groundwater recharge potential zone (GWRPZ) and the well yields, which helped in the validation of the results. The changes in the 2022 LULC with reference to the 2000 LULC resulted in the excellent, very good and good recharge zones decreasing by 59.16 %, 73.75 % and 56.98 %, respectively. The findings produced essential facts about the groundwater network and its reaction to LULC changes. The outcomes also revealed the implementation of certain sustainable strategies. This information can serve as a valuable tool for sustainable groundwater resource management and development in semi-arid regions.