The impact of Land Use Change on Groundwater Level in Isfahan-Borkhar, Najafabad and Chadegan Plains

In the current study, the effect of land use change on groundwater level in Isfahan-Borkhar, Najafabad and Chadegan plains was investigated during 25-year period (1990-2015). To provide land use maps, firstly Landsat images of years; 1985, 1994, 2006 and 2015 were provided and then the nearest neighbor algorithm of object-oriented method was used for images processing. In addition, the zoning maps of groundwater level in annual scale were prepared using Kriging method. In order to investigate the differences of piezometric data among different plains and also the effect of land use types on groundwater level, the analysis of variance (ANOVA) test with repeated measure was used. The results showed that in Isfahan-Borkhar and Najafabad plains, the average groundwater level of rangelands had a significant difference with other land uses. In addition, investigating the interactive relationship of the land uses change percentages and the groundwater level decline showed a serious decrease in groundwater level of both Isfahan-Borkhar and Najafabad plains in the last years, in spite of reduction in agricultural land use during the study period. Furthermore, according to the obtained results, the groundwater level drawdown in Chadegan Plain as compared with two other plains was mainly affected by increasing agricultural lands.