This project was funded by the Water Research Commission (South Africa) to develop a groundwater database and visualisation tools for the City of Cape Town, which in 2017/2018 experienced serious water restrictions due to a prolonged drought and was slowly approaching day-zero, the day the taps would run dry. The main aim of the project was a comprehensive database of groundwater sources (boreholes, wells, springs etc.) that could help the City water resources managers to make informed decisions regarding the use of groundwater as additional source, which has become increasingly important, and also have a tool to educate the public about groundwater and its use.
PostgreSQL was chosen as the preferred database, because of its extensive spatial capabilities and user management, with the Aquabase front-end software to enter and manage the data and output, while QGIS was selected to create the online mapping tool serving the QGIS project to the QWC2 web client with the QGIS server component. All these are open-source applications and therefore did not result in additional start-up and maintenance costs.
The original mapping website could be found at: https://blecher.dyndns.org, but this location is no longer available. For a new and enhanced version of the web-based map please have a look at https://www.groundwaterinfo.africa, which is based on Lizmap, another web client for QGIS projects.
A few samples of the maps, that resulted from the project are shown below:
