Study of the spatial changes subsidence of Damghan plain and its prediction using artificial neural network model

Indiscriminate exploitation of groundwater has caused a decrease in the groundwater level and as a result, has caused land subsidence in many areas. This problem is especially visible in arid and semi-arid regions like Iran, where water supply for agriculture, drinking, and industry is done from groundwater water sources, and in recent years, it has seriously threatened the aquifers of the plains as a serious danger. In this research, due to the importance of the problem, land subsidence in the Damghan Plain aquifer located in Semnan province was studied and investigated.In this research, the amount of subsidence was measured at the field, and then its spatial changes were investigated using conventional methods such as Kriging interpolation, Co-kriging, and inverse distance weighted interpolation (IDW). Also, the artificial neural network model was used to estimate and interpolate the amount of subsidence. Three statistical indices namely the coefficient of correlation (R2), the root mean square error (RMSE), and the mean absolute error (MAE) were used to compare the estimation of subsidence values using an artificial neural network model, kriging interpolation method, cokriging, and IDW. To perform interpolation using kriging, cokriging, and IDW interpolation methods, the variogram of land subsidence data was drawn. Also, in order to increase the accuracy of the mentioned models in predicting the amount of subsidence, the auxiliary variable of water level reduction was used.Using different functions such as circular, spherical, exponential, Gaussian, and linear models for plotting the semivariogram, results show that the Gaussian function with segment-to-threshold ratio (C0/(C0+C)) equal to 0.26 has better performance compared to other models. Also, the artificial neural network has a better performance compared to the kriging method and the inverse weighted distance method and has been able to reduce the RMSE error value in the validation stage by 17.6% and 31.3%, respectively. It has also increased the value of the R2 from 0.502 and 0.421 to 0.721.The use of the auxiliary variable of water level reduction has increased the accuracy of the models used in predicting the amount of subsidence. In this case, the comparison between the estimation of subsidence values using the artificial neural network model compared to the interpolation method of kriging, cokriging, and IDW shows that the artificial neural network model with a coefficient of determination (