Editorial: New tools and techniques for advanced water resource management
Gopal Krishan
P. K. Mishra
Debabrata Sahoo2 
Alexandre S. Gagnon- 1National Institute of Hydrology, Roorkee, India
- 2Department of Agricultural Sciences, College of Agricultural, Forest, and Life Sciences, Clemson University, Clemson, SC, United States
- 3School of Biological and Environmental Sciences James Parsons Building, Liverpool, United Kingdom
Editorial on the Research Topic
New tools and techniques for advanced water resource management
Background
Water is essential for human health, agriculture, industrial processes, and ecological balance. However, the growing global population and the urge for continuous economic development have increased the pressure on water quality (Lapworth et al., 2018), leading to water scarcity in many regions of the world (MacDonald et al., 2016). Several factors contribute to quality water scarcity, including over-extraction of groundwater (Shamsuddua et al., 2011; MacAllister et al., 2022), inefficient water management practices, climate change, and unregulated disposal of waste into the waterbodies. Water pollution is a significant challenge, as it can degrade the quality of the limited freshwater sources, making them unsafe for human consumption and harmful to ecosystems.
Degradation of water resources by salinity (Krishan et al., 2021), emerging pollutants (Lapworth et al., 2018), and legacy contaminants from point and non-point sources, are an increasingly critical issue. This concern has also been raised by various agencies including the United States Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA). There have been already an acute water scarcity and polluting these resources will be alarming for the sustainability of these resources.
There is an urgent need to find the recharge sources and recharge zone of groundwater so that the water levels in aquifers can be managed by increasing the water levels. This can be done through fingerprinting of water and getting estimates of groundwater residence times by the use of environmental isotopes or environmental tracers (Lapworth et al., 2015; Krishan et al., 2021; 2023). The isotope techniques can also be used in the groundwater pollution studies (Krishan et al., 2021; 2022).
Globally, there is an urgent need to find sustainable solutions to the increasing scarcity of freshwater resources. With more advanced tools and techniques for assessing water resources and water quality, including Artificial Neural Networks (Lohani and Krishan, 2015), Machine Learning (Ghobadi and Kang, 2023), and Artificial Intelligence (Chang et al., 2023), there are possibilities to evaluate water-related issues and find the proper optimal management solutions for their sustainability.
This Research Topic contributes to the global challenge of achieving water security by presenting new insights and tools that can strengthen water management and policy. The studies cover a wide range of topics as below:
(i) Mihu-Pintilie et al. assess the groundwater pollution potential by ethnoarchaeological evidence based saline groundwater sources in the Eastern Carpathians and Sub-Carpathians area of Romania. This study is on saline groundwater sources and will be very much useful, since worldwide this issue has been discussed at various forums. Groundwater salinity has been observed in inland as well coastal aquifers.
(ii) Xiao et al. carried out study on age dating of stream water to understand various watershed hydrological processes and biogeochemical cycle. From age dating in addition to various components of hydrological cycle, we find the residence time of the water and is useful to the water managers and policymakers.
(iii) Thomas et al. in their study found that offshore freshened groundwater as a potential unconventional water in coastal city of Shanghai;
(iv) Gladish et al. in their study assessed and managed contamination risks and health hazards in mining areas. Authors found that mining is done at various scales and there is need to carry out the risk assessment along with studying the environment impacts.
(v) Day-Lewis et al. carried out a study on spatial distribution using quantification of hydrologic exchange flows for monitoring dam-regulated rivers. It was observed that to manage the overflows as well as water scarcity, one need to understand the spatial distribution as well as monitoring of the rivers to maintain environment flows.
This Research Topic culminates in the reputation to achieve water security and espousing aims to allow end-users to meet this societal challenge. It is a compendium of research articles on water crisis assessment, managing surface and groundwater resources, isotope dating tools supplementing hydrological valuation, and other issues and its sustainable attenuation through ingenious ideas and technologies that will be highly useful to the stakeholders, water managers, policymakers and academicians.
Author contributions
GK: Writing–original draft, Writing–review and editing. PM: Writing–review and editing. DS: Writing–review and editing. AG: Writing–review and editing.
Funding
The author(s) declare that financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This work was supported by the National Institute of Hydrology, Roorkee.
Acknowledgments
As the guest editors of the Research Topic, we are thankful for the support of the Editor in Chief of the journal and Frontiers’ specialist team. We are incredibly grateful to all the reviewers who provided valuable comments that ensured the high quality of the accepted papers. We highly acknowledge all authors who contributed to this Research Topic.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Publisher’s note
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References
Chang, F.-J., Chang, L.-C., and Chen, J.-F. (2023). Artificial intelligence techniques in Hydrology and water resources management. Water 15, 1846. doi:10.3390/w15101846
Ghobadi, F., and Kang, D. (2023). Application of machine learning in water resources management: a systematic literature review. Water 15, 620. doi:10.3390/w15040620
Krishan, G., Kumar, B., Sudarsan, N., Rao, M. S., Ghosh, N. C., Taloor, A. K., et al. (2021). Isotopes (δ18O, δD and 3H) variations in groundwater with emphasis on salinization in the State of Punjab, India. Sci. Total Environ. 789, 148051. doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.148051
Krishan, G., Lapworth, D. J., MacDonald, A. M., and Rao, M. S. (2023). Groundwater recharge sources and processes in northwest India: evidence from high frequency water isotope observations. J. Hydrology-Regional Stud. 50, 101570. doi:10.1016/j.ejrh.2023.101570
Krishan, G., Rao, M. S., Rajesh, V., Chaudhary, A., Singh, J., and Kumar, A. (2022). Isotopic assessment of groundwater salinity: a case study of the southwest (SW) region of Punjab, India. Water 14, 133. doi:10.3390/w14010133
Lapworth, D., Das, P., Shaw, A., Mukherjee, A., Civil, W., Petersen, J., et al. (2018). Deep urban groundwater vulnerability in India revealed through the use of emerging organic contaminants and residence time tracers. Environ. Pollut. 240, 938–949. doi:10.1016/j.envpol.2018.04.053
Lapworth, D. J., MacDonald, A. M., Krishan, G., Rao, M. S., Gooddy, D. C., and Darling, W. G. (2015). Groundwater recharge and age-depth profiles of intensively exploited groundwater resources in northwest India. Geophys. Res. Lett. 42 (18), 7554–7562. doi:10.1002/2015GL065798
Lohani, A. K., and Krishan, G. (2015). Groundwater level simulation using artificial neural network in southeast, Punjab, India. J. Geol. Geosciences 4 (3), 206. doi:10.4172/2329-6755.1000206
MacAllister, D. J., Krishan, G., Basharat, M., Cuba, D., and MacDonald, A. M. (2022). A century of groundwater accumulation in Pakistan and northwest India. Nat. Geosci. 15, 390–396. doi:10.1038/s41561-022-00926-1
MacDonald, A., Bonsor, H., Ahmed, K., Burgess, W., Basharat, M., Calow, R., et al. (2016). Groundwater quality and depletion in the Indo-Gangetic Basin mapped from in situ observations. Nat. Geosci. 9, 762–766. doi:10.1038/ngeo2791
Keywords: water resources, tools and techniques, management, sustainability, water quality
Citation: Krishan G, Mishra PK, Sahoo D and Gagnon AS (2024) Editorial: New tools and techniques for advanced water resource management. Front. Earth Sci. 12:1379392. doi: 10.3389/feart.2024.1379392
Received: 31 January 2024; Accepted: 11 March 2024;
Published: 21 March 2024.
Edited and reviewed by:
Wouter Buytaert, Imperial College London, United KingdomCopyright © 2024 Krishan, Mishra, Sahoo and Gagnon. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Gopal Krishan, drgopal.krishan@gmail.com
†These authors have contributed equally to this work