Spatial multicriteria approach to support water resources management with multiple sources in semi-arid areas in Brazil.

Semi-arid regions often face severe drought events that reduce agricultural and livestock production. In recent years, some international studies have used multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) approaches combined with geographic information systems (GIS-MCDA) to support decision-makers in assessing the suitability of agricultural land for irrigation in semi-arid regions. Unlike previous studies, which have only considered a single source of water for crop irrigation, this study proposes a GIS-MCDA approach that considers all potentially available local water sources (e.

Cellular automata predictive model for man-made environment growth in a Brazilian semi-arid watershed.

The current study implements a cellular automata-based model for the development of land use/land cover (LULC) future scenarios using a Remote Sensing (RS) Imagery series (1985 to 2018) as data input and focusing on human activities drivers in a 6700-km watershed vital for the water security of Paraiba state, Brazil. The methodology has three stages: the first stage is the pre-processing of images and preparing them as data input for the cellular automata land use model built in the R software environment (SIMLANDER); the stage of calibration establishes the variables and verifies the influence of each one on the LULC of the region; the last step corresponds to the validation procedures. After model calibration, land use maps for future scenarios (2019 to 2045) were simulated.

The Brazilian drought monitoring in a multi-annual perspective.

Droughts, which consist of natural and transient water deficits, endanger the water, food, and energy security of ecosystems. An effective drought preparedness strategy must focus on mitigating socioeconomic vulnerabilities to the phenomenon. In this context, the article aims to analyze the multi-annual characteristic of droughts in the Northeast region of Brazil.