The Most Important Factors that Affect the Potential of Groundwater Resources Piranshahr Watershed (West Azarbaijan) Using the MaxEnt Model and the GIS

Groundwater is the most important and vital natural resource in arid and semi-arid regions. The purpose of the study is to determine the potential of groundwater in different areas of the watershed and prioritize the factors affecting it. Fourteen indices were used which affect groundwater potential namely slope, elevation, slope aspect, topographic curvature, distance from any stream, drainage density, distance from a fault, fault density, topography humidity index, lithology, land use, relative slope position, topographic position, and topographic hardness. Moreover, from the 145 springs, 30% were randomly classified as the validation data and 70% were categorized as the test data. The maximum entropy method and the MaxEnt model was used to prioritize the effective factors and zonation of groundwater potential using the ArcGIS in the Piranshahr Watershed. Further, the ROC model was used to evaluate the developed model. The results indicated that 33.6% of the watershed had groundwater potential, which is located mostly in its center. Based on the jackknife</em> chart, humidity, topography, DEM, lithology (sandstone and shale), topographic hardness, topographic position and slope were the most important factors influencing the groundwater potential. The area under the curve shows an accuracy of 93% (excellent) at the training stage and 81% (very good) at the validation stage for the determination of the watershed groundwater potential. The results of this research may be used to manage the groundwater resources of the Piranshahr Watershed, especially with regards to imminent population growth.