Search

University of Victoria Dataverse Logo
Data and code from: Groundwaterscapes: A global classification and mapping of groundwater's large-scale socioeconomic, ecological, and Earth system functions
Borealis
Huggins, Xander; Gleeson, Tom; Villholth, Karen G.; Rocha, Juan C.; Famiglietti, James S. — 2024-10-10 <strong> This repository consists of: </strong> <br> 1. The global groundwaterscape classification raster <br> 2. The groundwaterscape legend, with descriptions and attributes of each groundwaterscape <br> 3. The colour map to reproduce the groundwaterscape maps as shown in the associated paper <br> 4. An archive of the scripts used to perform all analysis, also located at the GitHub repository: <a href ="https://github.com/XanderHuggins/groundwaterscapes" target="_blank">https://github.com/XanderHuggins/groundwaterscapes</a><br> 5. A ReadMe file <br> <br> <strong> Associated paper's abstract: </strong> <br> Groundwater is a dynamic component of the global water cycle with important social, economic, ecological, and Earth system functions. We present a new global classification and mapping of groundwater systems, which we call groundwaterscapes, that represent predominant configurations of large-scale groundwater system functions. We identify and map 15 groundwaterscapes which offer a new lens to conceptualize, study, model, and manage groundwater. Groundwaterscapes are derived using a novel application of sequenced self-organizing maps that capture patterns in groundwater system functions at the grid cell level (~10 km), including groundwater-dependent ecosystem type and density, storage capacity, irrigation, safe drinking water access, and national governance. All large aquifer systems of the world are characterized by multiple groundwaterscapes, highlighting the pitfalls of treating these groundwater bodies as lumped systems in global assessments. We evaluate the distribution of Global Groundwater Monitoring Network wells across groundwaterscapes and find that industrial agricultural regions are disproportionately monitored, while several groundwaterscapes have next to no monitoring wells. This disparity undermines the ability to understand system dynamics across the full range of settings that characterize groundwater systems globally. We argue that groundwaterscapes offer a conceptual and spatial tool to guide model development, hypothesis testing, and future data collection initiatives to better understand groundwater’s embeddedness within social-ecological systems at the global scale.
University of Victoria Dataverse Logo
Quantifying groundwater’s contribution to regional environmental flows in diverse hydrologic landscapes (data)
Borealis
Mohan, Chinchu; Gleeson, Tom; Forstner, Tara; Famiglietti, James S; de Graaf, Inge — 2022-07-05 Growing recognition of the importance of ecosystem services to the development and management of water resources has spurred the development and application of environmental flows requirements. Despite the importance of groundwater in maintaining the freshwater ecosystem, groundwater is seldom taken into consideration in environmental flows allocation and management. In this study we develop two methods for estimating groundwater contribution to environmental flows: 1) a groundwater-centric method and 2) a surface water-centric method. The two methods are demonstrated using the western province of Canada, British Columbia as a case study. The framework presented in this study can be implemented across different spatial and temporal scales for different regions and globally, in data-scarce, hydrologically complex landscapes. The application of these methods can aid in a robust and holistic assessment of environmental flows, taking into account the often missing groundwater component.
University of Victoria Dataverse Logo
Poor correlation between large-scale environmental flows violations and global freshwater biodiversity: implications for water resource management and the water planetary boundary
Borealis
Gleeson, Tom; Mohan, Chinchu; Famiglietti, James S; Virkki, Vili; Kummu, Matti; Porkka, Miina; Wang-Erlandsson, Lan; Huggins, Xander; Gerten, Dieter; Jähnig, Sonja C — 2022-07-12 The freshwater ecosystems all over the world are degrading, such that maintaining environmental flow (EF) in river networks is critical to their preservation. The relationship between streamflow alterations and, respectively, EF violations, and freshwater biodiversity is well established at the scale of stream reaches or small basins (~<100 km²). However, it is unclear if this relationship is robust at larger scales even though there are large-scale initiatives to legalize the EF requirement and EFs have been used in assessing a planetary boundary for freshwater. Therefore, this study intends to evaluate the relationship between EF violation and freshwater biodiversity at large basin scale (median area = 19,600 km2), globally-aggregated scales, and at freshwater ecoregions, and test the prevailing assumption of scalability of this relationship. Four EF violation indices (severity, frequency, the probability to shift to violated state, and probability to stay violated) and nine independent freshwater biodiversity indicators (calculated from observed biota data except one empirically derived from streamflow deviation) were used for correlation analysis. EF violations showed an inverse relationship with the streamflow-derived biodiversity indicator (MSAhy) at the level 5 HydroBASIN scale. However, no statistically significant negative relationship between environmental flows and freshwater biodiversity was found at the global or ecoregion scale except between the streamflow-derived biodiversity indicator (MSAhy) and all EF violation indices. While our results thus suggest that streamflow and EF may not be the main determinants of freshwater biodiversity, they do not preclude the existence of relationships with more holistic EF methods (e.g. including water temperature, water quality, intermittency, connectivity, etc.) or with other biodiversity data or metrics.
University of Victoria Dataverse Logo
Data Management Plan for UVic’s Groundwater Science and Sustainability Research Group
Borealis
Gleeson, Tom — 2023-05-09 This Data Management Plan (DMP) is for the <a href="http://www.groundwaterscienceandsustainability.org/">Groundwater Science and Sustainability Research Group</a> at the University of Victoria whose mission is advancing scientific research and engaging with governments and organizations to secure water resources in British Columbia and around the world. <br><br> This plan can be modified for specific projects and uses language and inspiration from previous exemplar plans in <a href="https://zenodo.org/record/4062478"> ecohydrology</a> and <a href="https://zenodo.org/record/4701021">open science</a>. It helps us share more and make our lives easier by keeping our data organized and properly backed up so that we can:<br> <ul><li>use data that we already have from previous projects;</li> <li>share data within our group and with others;</li> <li>back-up and archive data so that it will be useable by others in the future; and</li> <li>be at the forefront of open science, data transparency and sharing</li> </ul> <br> Our publicly shared data is centrally organized on the ‘<a href="http://www.groundwaterscienceandsustainability.org/data.html">data</a>’ or ‘<a href="http://www.groundwaterscienceandsustainability.org/publications.html">publications</a>’ pages of our group website. We are strongly committed to open science principles and practices by sharing:<br> <ul><li>code through GitHub repositories;</li> <li>datasets of published results through UVic’s Dataverse or figshare;</li> <li>field data through community science portals such as anecdata;</li> <li>preprints of submitted manuscripts through EarthArXiv;</li> <li>plain language summaries though the Water Underground blog; and</li> <li>promoting our research on social media.</li> </ul>
University of Victoria Dataverse Logo
Global volume and distribution of modern groundwater: groundwater age transport modeling results (data)
Borealis
Gleeson, Tom; Befus, Kevin; Jasechko, Scott; Luijendijk, Elco; Cardenas, M. Bayani — 2018-10-25 The authors combine geochemical, geologic, hydrologic and geospatial data sets with numerical simulations of groundwater and analyse tritium ages to show that less than 6% of the groundwater in the uppermost portion of Earth’s landmass is modern. We find that the total groundwater volume in the upper 2 km of continental crust is approximately 22.6 million km3, of which 0.1–5.0 million km3 is less than 50 years old. Although modern groundwater represents a small percentage of the total groundwater on Earth, the volume of modern groundwater is equivalent to a body of water with a depth of about 3 m spread over the continents. This water resource dwarfs all other components of the active hydrologic cycle. For each continent, we present the geomatic assignment of hydrologic parameters and the resulting simulation-based modern groundwater equivalent (D_eq50) for the purely geomatic assignment of parameters, an estimate pairing models to watersheds using groundwater recharge and strict lithology control, and an estimate using recharge and strict water table gradient control. These files have a 2 letter acronym for the continent/landmass followed by _globalws_results_Gleesonetal_NatGeo.csv. The corresponding watershed data can be downloaded at hydrosheds.org. Geomatic analyses used an updated, unpublished HydroSHEDS watershed boundaries that are slightly different than those available on hydrosheds.org (Bernhard Lehner, personal communication 2014). Therefore, in the data presented here, we used a spatial join to assign the modeling results and geomatic data to the currently downloadable HydroSHEDS zeroth-level watersheds. Nearly all of the watersheds were very similar in extent, however a variable small percent (< 0.1%) of watersheds in each continent were not located in the currently downloadable HydroSHEDS data.
University of Victoria Dataverse Logo
Data from: Overlooked risks and opportunities in groundwatersheds of the world’s protected areas
Borealis
Huggins, Xander; Gleeson, Tom; Serrano, David; Zipper, Sam; Jehn, Florian; Rohde, Melissa M.; Abell, Robin; Vigerstol, Kari; Hartmann, Andreas — 2023-03-01 <strong> This repository consists of: </strong> <br> 1. A GeoTIFF (.tif) of groundwater-dependent ecosystem (GDE) types at 30 arcsecond resolution, globally <br> 2. A GeoTIFF (.tif) of groundwatershed extents for GDEs within protected areas, derived globally at 30 arcsecond resolution <br> 3. A GeoPackage (.gpkg) containing vector polygons of all contiguous protected areas included in the study with key summary statistics provided in the attribute data <br> 4. An archive of the scripts used to perform all analysis, also located at the GitHub repository: https://github.com/XanderHuggins/groundwatersheds-for-PAs <br> 5. A ReadMe file <br> <br> <strong> Associated paper's abstract: </strong> <br> Protected areas are a key tool for conserving biodiversity, sustaining ecosystem services and improving human well-being. Global initiatives that aim to expand and connect protected areas generally focus on controlling ‘above ground’ impacts such as land use, overlooking the potential for human actions in adjacent areas to affect protected areas through groundwater flow. Here, we assess the potential footprint of these impacts by mapping groundwatersheds for the world’s protected areas. We find that 85% of protected areas with groundwater-dependent ecosystems have groundwatersheds that are underprotected, meaning that some portion of the groundwatershed lies outside of the protected area. Half of all protected areas have a groundwatershed with a spatial footprint that lies mostly (i.e., at least 50%) outside of the protected area’s boundary. These findings highlight a widespread potential risk to protected areas from activities affecting groundwater outside protected areas, underscoring the need for groundwatershed-based conservation and management measures. Delineating groundwatersheds can catalyze needed discussions about protected area connectivity and robustness, and groundwatershed conservation and management can help protect groundwater-dependent ecosystems from external threats.
University of Victoria Dataverse Logo
GLobal HYdrogeology MaPS (GLHYMPS) of permeability and porosity
Borealis
Gleeson, Tom — 2018-10-25 The lack of robust, spatially distributed subsurface data is the key obstacle limiting the implementation of complex and realistic groundwater dynamics into global land surface, hydrologic, and climate models. We map and analyze permeability and porosity globally and at high resolution for the first time. The new permeability and porosity maps are based on a recently completed high-resolution global lithology map that differentiates fine and coarse-grained sediments and sedimentary rocks, which is important since these have different permeabilities. The average polygon size in the new map is ~100 km2, which is a more than hundredfold increase in resolution compared to the previous map which has an average polygon size of ~14,000 km2. We also significantly improve the representation in regions of weathered tropical soils and permafrost. The spatially distributed mean global permeability ~10-15m2 with permafrost or ~1014m2 without permafrost. The spatially distributed mean porosity of the globe is 14%. The maps will enable further integration of groundwater dynamics into land surface, hydrologic, and climate models.
University of Victoria Dataverse Logo
Data from: Hotspots for social and ecological impacts from freshwater stress and storage loss
Borealis
Huggins, Xander; Gleeson, Tom; Kummu, Matti; Zipper, Sam C.; Wada, Yoshihide; Troy, Tara J.; Famiglietti, James S. — 2021-11-30 Humans and ecosystems are deeply connected to, and through, the hydrological cycle. However, impacts of hydrological change on social and ecological systems are infrequently evaluated together at the global scale. Here, we focus on the potential for social and ecological impacts from freshwater stress and storage loss. We find basins with existing freshwater stress are drying (losing storage) disproportionately, exacerbating the challenges facing the water stressed versus non-stressed basins of the world. We map the global gradient in social-ecological vulnerability to freshwater stress and storage loss and identify hotspot basins for prioritization (n = 168). These most-vulnerable basins encompass over 1.5 billion people, 17% of global food crop production, 13% of global gross domestic product, and hundreds of significant wetlands. There are thus substantial social and ecological benefits to reducing vulnerability in hotspot basins, which can be achieved through hydro-diplomacy, social adaptive capacity building, and integrated water resources management practices.

Map search instructions

1.Turn on the map filter by clicking the “Limit by map area” toggle.
2.Move the map to display your area of interest. Holding the shift key and clicking to draw a box allows for zooming in on a specific area. Search results change as the map moves.
3.Access a record by clicking on an item in the search results or by clicking on a location pin and the linked record title.
Note: Clusters are intended to provide a visual preview of data location. Because there is a maximum of 50 records displayed on the map, they may not be a completely accurate reflection of the total number of search results.

(Author: Gleeson, Tom)

Limit by:

Clear all

to