118-6 Bridging Water Gaps for Sustainability: Deep Network Integration of Groundwater and Surface Water in the Terrestrial Water Geosphere

Session: Groundwater in Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals

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The flows, storages, and quality of water on land—the terrestrial water both beneath and at the land surface—underpin the survival and stability of societies and ecosystems around the world. Comparing different reports and perspectives on how the groundwater and surface waters interact with each other, and with other societal, climate, and environmental components and aspects of the Earth System, reveals a fragmented and even contradictory understanding. Such gaps and inconsistencies hinder the achievement of many sustainable development goals related to water, and can endanger vulnerable communities and ecosystems where compromised water availability and quality threaten public and ecological health, economic stability, and biodiversity. Effectively addressing the challenges requires a unification of knowledge and of how we understand and handle water interactions and their heterogeneity across the global land area. A network-based approach is proposed to achieve this, by comparatively and consistently identifying and bridging the key knowledge and inconsistency barriers. A deep-network standard model, developed for the terrestrial geosphere as an integrated whole, can be used and tested to dismantle the barriers across disciplinary and sectoral domains, and to transform fragmented knowledge into actionable wisdom for sustainable development.

Geological Society of America Abstracts with Program. Vol. 57, No. 6, 2025

doi: 10.1130/abs/2025AM-9785

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