Towards an integrated water resource management system

In Morocco, establishing an Integrated Water Resource Management System is fundamental for sustainable development. With regards to its mission CRTS is carrying numerous actions through the country to demonstrate the role of the rapidly evolving earth observation programs for collecting and disseminating water related information in cost effective and sustainable ways. In this paper, parts of the results from these actions will be presented from different applications in different water contexts.

The first case study aims at developing, in the Souss-Massa hydraulic basin, an integrated approach including the exploitation of the satellite data, the pre-existing data and the Geographical Information Systems (GIS) as sources of information and tools of analysis within the water management process. This region has continuous aquifers that are facing a severe depletion because of intensive irrigated activities. The use of multi-sensors and multi-temporal satellite images (optics and radar) enables to highlight new practices on the current situation of the land use, particularly in the irrigated areas during the last decades. The land use changes analysis shows the surface expression of the groundwater over-exploitation by generating an intensive dynamic, with regards to different aspects of land use changes, in particular in terms of irrigated zones extension. These changes are of two forms, closely related to the reduction (disappearance) or the extension (appearance) of irrigated agricultural activities. In the first case, they are essentially related to the urbanization pressure, soil degradation, and groundwater overexploitation. In the second case, considered as more dominant, these changes take form of appearance of new irrigated farms where groundwater is still more available. Although the general trend at the basin scale shows a continuous increase in irrigated surfaces, locally these irrigated zones are disappearing. The extension seems to be more generalized for the whole plain region and not simply limited to the upstream as it was expected.