1856-1865Evaluation of groundwater potential and mapping using geospatial platform is crucial especially for semi-arid hard rock and coastal adjoining terrain to identify the zones of very good, good, moderate and poor groundwater potential. The Mambakkam mini watershed, Tamil Nadu (India) is situated towards the southern part of Chennai city. It is experiencing commercial development of groundwater in addition with escalating domestic and industrial demands. The present study is aimed to develop the mapping of groundwater potential zones for the selected urbanized watershed by using the remote sensing and geospatial techniques. Data like water level, water quality, rainfall, climatology and geophysical resistivity from various sources and satellite imageries have been used for this study to observe the changes on the sources of water resource system. The Inverse Distance Weighted (IDW) method was used for generating the thematic layers of rainfall, depth to bed rock, weathered rock, jointed rock and water levels. The generated village wise groundwater potential map has shown a vast spatial variability of ground water potential and the area that belongs to the “very good” potential category is quite less in the entire study area (12 %) which alarms the development of existing groundwater resource. The study concluded that considerable falling trend of groundwater level during pre-monsoon showing the alarming threat for further development. Thus the presented study identified the risk of groundwater development and provides guidelines to water resource mangers and village officials to recommend conservation and protection strategies against the uncontrolled commercial development especially on the identified poor groundwater potential zones
