Accurate and timely information about the geographic distribution of irrigated cropland is important for a range of applications including crop assessments, water resources management, drought monitoring, and environmental modeling.

Land and water degradation due to on-site soil/nutrient loss and off-site pollution/sedimentation are serious environmental problems. Landscape planning and management tools are essential to implement best management practices targeted at locations where they are needed most. Although many soil/water-landscape studies have been published in the last 2 decades, progress in developing operational tools for supporting landscape planning to minimize land and water degradation in developing regions is still modest.

Lake Chad in Africa experienced severe droughts in the 1970s and 1980s and overexploitations of water resulting in a decline of water level in the Lake and surrounding rivers. Such droughts and overexploitation of water caused a significant change of land use and water management practices over the last 50� years. Understanding the change of land use and land cover is, therefore, crucial to understand disturbance of the water cycle around the Lake.

Pakistan is an agricultural country with an increasing interest for hydropower. Water management problems such as sedimentation and evaporation have been of high concern for surface water reservoirs for many years. Therefore, groundwater storage through subsurface dams could be promising, especially considering the monsoon rainfall and seasonal river flows in Pakistan. The paper aims to develop and test a methodology to locate suitable sites for construction of subsurface dams using spatial multi-criteria analysis (SMCA) in the northern parts of Pakistan.