Socio-hydrogeology, as the preface defines it, recognises the reciprocal and recursive relationship between human societies and groundwater systems. It asks who has access to groundwater and for what purposes, how that access is shaped by social structures, how groundwater is governed, who holds decision-making authority and whose interests that governance serves, and which alternative understandings of groundwater exist beyond the conventions of western science. Crucially, the field places hydrogeological processes and socio-cultural dynamics in explicit co-production, coupling insights from the social sciences, arts and humanities with hydrogeological knowledge. While hydrogeology has long acknowledged societal influences on groundwater and vice versa, the explicit naming of socio-hydrogeology in 2015 signalled a shift: the social and cultural dimensions of groundwater moved from the margins of the discipline to a defining characteristic of its research frontier.

The special issue is organised around four broad themes: theories, frameworks and new paradigms; justice, power and decolonisation; governance and participatory engagement; and socio-hydrogeological systems and public health. Together, the contributions demonstrate that socio-hydrogeology is more than a bridge between hydrogeology and the social sciences. By foregrounding the hydrogeological, the field complements adjacent interdisciplinary enterprises such as socio-hydrology, socio-ecology and hydro-social approaches, while insisting on the particularity of groundwater, aquifers and hydrogeological processes in society. Typical subjects include access to drinking water, health-related dimensions of groundwater quality, economic uses spanning agriculture, industry and energy, and leisure activities such as thermal bathing, placing socio-hydrogeology in productive dialogue with urban hydrogeology, medical hydrogeology and groundwater quality research.

The first thematic section confronts conventional understandings of groundwater itself. Re and colleagues trace the development of the field and call for the social and cultural dimensions of groundwater, and the skills needed to engage with them, to be addressed explicitly in hydrogeological education. Söller and colleagues show that inter- and trans-disciplinary knowledge co-production between scientists and stakeholders is critical for tackling complex socio-hydrogeological challenges and for developing context-specific, sustainable management strategies. Cuthbert traces the historical and cultural evolution of groundwater understanding in western societies, arguing that its reduction to an abstract resource obscures its relational nature and limits more sustainable ways of engaging with it. In perhaps the most striking contribution, RiverOfLife and colleagues draw on Indigenous knowledge from the Martuwarra Fitzroy River region of Australia, presenting an understanding of groundwater entangled with culture, knowledge and ancestral personhood, and arguing for more just and cooperative approaches to water governance. Healy then reconceptualises aquifers as active, more-than-human agents capable of influencing their environments through performative interactions, potentially opening new perspectives on water-society relations and development pathways.

The second section tackles power, justice and the legacy of colonialism head-on. Bourke and colleagues highlight how enduring colonial influences continue to shape hydrogeological practice and groundwater governance, calling for more inclusive, rights-based approaches that centre Indigenous and local community knowledge. Hamilton examines Australia’s Great Artesian Basin, arguing that the perceived unknowability of groundwater there, alongside claims of scientific uncertainty, was historically constructed and politically leveraged to resist regulation, shaping enduring patterns of over-extraction and governance. Taylor and colleagues contend that integrating water justice principles with hydrogeological science is essential for equitable and effective management frameworks in the face of climate change and growing resource pressures, while Nelson and colleagues show that gaps and inconsistencies in governance frameworks can undermine protections for vulnerable communities. Agrawal explores how diverse actors construct and negotiate groundwater, producing what the preface describes as a classed, casted and more-than-human assemblage of aquifers, tube wells and water flows.

Governance and participatory engagement form the third pillar of the collection, illustrated through a remarkably diverse set of case studies. Milman and Roberts show how ambiguities embedded in California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, arising from institutional, informational and governance gaps, generated divergent interpretations during implementation, leading to uneven outcomes and reduced policy effectiveness. Mustafa and colleagues demonstrate that collaborative modelling with stakeholders can simultaneously improve the capabilities of hydrogeological models and the understanding and acceptance of model results. At the community scale, Loh and colleagues show that collective action and social learning among farmers in Ghana’s Keta Strip are critical to sustainable groundwater management, since uncoordinated individual use and weak institutional support can drive resource depletion. Frommen and Groeschke report on participatory groundwater management in Jaipur, India, finding that participatory socio-hydrogeological approaches are essential for water projects that are both sustainable and responsive to local realities. Basel and colleagues show that community-led, small-scale managed aquifer recharge can mitigate drought impacts, with effectiveness shaped by both hydrological conditions and social dynamics, and Gleeson advocates integrating arts-based research into hydrogeology to deepen cultural and emotional connections to groundwater.

The final section connects groundwater to place-based systems and public health. Using qualitative systems mapping in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, Carrard and colleagues conceptualise groundwater-based water services as complex socio-hydrogeological systems, highlighting the interlinked roles of household behaviour, resource sustainability and climate pressures in shaping governance and water security. Joshi reveals that groundwater monitoring in western India is not merely a technical task but a deeply social and political practice, proposing a grounded, pluralistic vision for socio-hydrogeology that listens, learns and reflects across disciplinary, institutional and cultural boundaries. On the health front, de Sousa and colleagues advance understanding of the water security-drought-health nexus, demonstrating that increased access to groundwater in drought-affected regions of semi-arid Brazil is associated with improved water security and reduced diarrhoea-related hospitalisations, underscoring the importance of integrating groundwater and drought management under climate change. Bhowmik and colleagues evaluate arsenic-safe drinking water options in India’s Western Bengal Basin, finding that existing community treatment systems often fail due to technical and social limitations, while locally accessible groundwater sources may offer a more feasible interim solution when guided by hydrogeological and socio-economic conditions.

The preface is candid about the field’s growing pains. One persistent challenge is the prevalence of scholarship that borrows approaches from other disciplines without truly integrating them. As Zwarteveen and colleagues recently identified in the adjacent field of socio-hydrology, science is situated: authors tend to approach studies either from natural science or social science perspectives, and genuinely integrative approaches remain less common. This reinforces the call from Re and colleagues to reform the content of hydrogeological education so that future hydrogeologists can meld understandings and methods from the natural and social sciences more fully. A more inclusive hydrogeological pedagogy, the editors argue, underpins many of the special issue’s contributions, from raising awareness of alternative terminologies to recognising how terms are understood differently across academic disciplines.

Looking forward, the preface identifies hydrogeological justice as a potentially substantive future agenda, encompassing both distributional and epistemic justice. This raises challenging new questions about what groundwater is, who it is for, over what timeframes, and how human demands should be balanced against the rights of non-human others, the so-called more-than-human world. There is also an emergent literature offering critical reflection on the ontologies and accepted practices that underlie hydrogeology itself, encouraging researchers to interrogate the assumed objectivity of their science and to recognise their own positionality and that of the methods and models they employ. For a discipline that is inherently place-based, the editors conclude, hydrogeology will always be socially and culturally aware; the task now is to make that awareness systematic, reflexive and transformative.

What emerges from this decade of scholarship is a portrait of hydrogeology advancing as a critical, progressive and reflexive science. The special issue shows that inter- and trans-disciplinary, context-centred approaches can bring genuinely new perspectives to groundwater science and its governance, providing fertile ground for interdisciplinary research, justice-oriented governance and a more inclusive hydrogeological discourse. As aquifers worldwide face depletion, contamination and climate stress, the message of socio-hydrogeology is clear: the technical questions of how much water lies underground can no longer be separated from the human questions of who gets it, who decides, and whose knowledge counts. The guest editors express the hope that others will join this journey in the decade to come.

Subject of Research: Socio-hydrogeology: the integration of social, cultural and justice dimensions into groundwater science and governance

Article Title: Preface: Advances in socio-hydrogeology

Article References: Healy, A., Re, V., Walker, D. W., Bourke, S., Frommen, T., Vora, S., de Carvalho, A. M., & Shiinda, G. (2026). Preface: Advances in socio-hydrogeology. Hydrogeology Journal, 34(6), 1635-1638. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10040-026-03151-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10040-026-03151-x

Keywords: socio-hydrogeology, groundwater, aquifers, water governance, hydrogeological justice, Indigenous knowledge, participatory research, decolonisation, water security, public health, managed aquifer recharge, hydrogeology education

Melbourne’s experience was extraordinary even by pandemic standards. The city was subject to public health restrictions prohibiting people from gathering for work or study for a cumulative total of 262 days across 2020 and 2021, the longest continuous lockdown anywhere in the world. For Currell, who had coordinated two hydrogeology coursework units with between 20 and 55 students since 2013, the implications were immediate. The shift to fully online delivery occurred just before the first week of the Australian academic year in March 2020, leaving almost no time to prepare. Like most of his colleagues worldwide, he was ill-equipped for the task, with little prior experience in delivering fully online content and assessment, and was simultaneously juggling care responsibilities, social isolation, and an intermittently unstable internet connection while teaching from home.

The technical response to the crisis reveals both the ingenuity and the limits of emergency online pedagogy. Rather than recycling pre-existing lecture recordings, Currell chose to rebuild his courses around livestreamed, recorded lectures and tutorial sessions, supplemented with new video content designed for viewing outside scheduled class times. For the introductory unit, the traditional weekly lecture and tutorial structure was retained. The advanced course adopted weekly ‘lectorial’ sessions for five weeks, followed by a three-day online intensive focused on solving groundwater flow and solute transport problems using the industry-standard MODFLOW-MT3D modeling codes. During the mid-year academic break in 2020, special permission allowed the instructor to work with a professional videographer to produce a 60-minute video demonstrating groundwater concepts using a benchtop model of a heterogeneous layered aquifer system, in which dyes injected at different locations trace flow paths and solute movement.

That video production, born of necessity, turned out to be a genuine pedagogical improvement. The format permitted close-up shots and time-lapse photography that had never been possible in a live classroom demonstration, allowing students to see the effects of changing hydraulic conductivity and hydraulic gradient on groundwater flow paths, solute transport, and ground-surface water interaction in unprecedented detail. The video was linked directly to an assessment task testing conceptual understanding, and it stands as a concrete example of how the pandemic accelerated the creation of digital teaching resources that can permanently enrich hydrogeology instruction when they are carefully planned and curated with adequate time and funding.

Not every element of the coursework translated so smoothly. Numerical modeling sessions, previously run as five full days of in-person practical work using MODFLOW and MT3D to build three-dimensional flow and transport models, were compressed into three days to avoid digital fatigue among students, supported by self-paced video tutorials. Small-group collaboration was salvaged through Microsoft Teams breakout rooms, which allowed students to share developing models and let the instructor troubleshoot individual problems remotely. Students appreciated the effort, but their feedback was unambiguous about the trade-off. One student reported that it took far longer to work through MODFLOW issues alone online than it would have to physically show someone the problem and receive immediate help. Both students and instructor concluded that direct, in-person guidance in building and debugging numerical models remains preferable even when screen sharing and breakout rooms are available.

The most profound loss, however, was the field trip. Before the pandemic, each semester of the introductory course included a full-day excursion to groundwater monitoring sites across a small coastal sedimentary aquifer historically affected by saltwater intrusion driven by high rates of seasonal extraction for irrigation. Students measured groundwater levels, collected samples, observed physicochemical characteristics, and recorded lithological features in soil and aquifer material, gradually assembling a working conceptual model of the system. In 2020 the trip could not run, and students instead completed desktop research using maps, reports, and hydrographs published online. While this built valuable skills in desk-based hydrogeological assessment, fundamental practical competencies that most students would encounter nowhere else in their degree simply could not be taught. The field trip was reinstated in 2021, and the instructor’s analysis aligns with a growing body of evidence that virtual field trips can complement but never replace in-person field training.

Assessment practices underwent their own controversial transformation. Supervised in-person examinations, the largest component of assessment before the pandemic, were replaced with 24-hour take-home online exams. Currell’s experience echoes findings from across the university sector: students typically undertook far less revision in preparation, relying on accessing information on demand during the exam rather than learning methods in advance and applying them to problems. The result was relatively poor exam performance and, arguably, a shallower understanding of the material. The concern has only intensified with the arrival of generative artificial intelligence, which makes unsupervised online assessment increasingly difficult to police. Yet a 2025 study by Newton and Draper found that more than 75 percent of surveyed UK universities were still using unsupervised online examinations during 2023 and 2024, raising what the essay describes as serious questions about quality assurance in higher education.

Perhaps surprisingly, the data on engagement told a more nuanced story. Comparing attendance figures and digital analytics tracking unique downloads and views of online material across pre-pandemic, pandemic, and post-pandemic years, Currell found that lecture and class attendance were broadly similar across all formats. The availability of online material, often promoted by universities as a way to broaden access for busy or remote students, had little impact on overall engagement numbers in this case. What mattered was structure: the highest levels of genuine engagement, as opposed to mere attendance, occurred wherever students were encouraged to discuss key ideas and case studies in groups and contribute to class discussions in a structured way, whether through breakout sessions in video call software or in a traditional classroom. The persistent challenge online was reaching quieter students who chose not to activate their cameras or microphones, and the social isolation imposed by lockdowns demonstrably limited the peer-to-peer interaction that underpins deep learning.

Student satisfaction ratings tell a story of resilience with a measurable cost. The two courses achieved overall satisfaction scores of 94.7 and 94.1 percent during fully online delivery, with students praising the efficiency of the transition and the use of real-world case studies. Yet both figures represented a slight decline from the 100 percent satisfaction recorded in the two years prior, a dip the essay attributes in part to the online engagement fatigue documented by researchers as the pandemic wore on. Qualitative comments revealed no serious concerns about overall course quality, but repeatedly flagged the modeling tutorials and the absence of fieldwork and face-to-face collaboration as the weak points of the online experience, with one student noting that a friend dropped the course after losing personal connections when teaching moved online.

Beneath these pedagogical questions lies a sharper equity problem that gives the essay its title. Currell’s experience during the pandemic was that many students, contrary to the stereotype of the well-equipped digital native, lacked the IT hardware, software, connectivity, or simply a stable, disturbance-free space in which to study effectively. University grant schemes sometimes helped with basic equipment but almost never addressed the need for an adequate working environment. This digital inequality, which researchers identify as a pressing and unresolved issue across tertiary education, threatens to create a divide in groundwater education precisely because many of the world’s most urgent groundwater crises affect low-income communities whose aspiring hydrogeologists have the least access to quality learning infrastructure. Currell argues that traditional classroom formats offer a standardized mechanism to level the playing field for many aspects of hydrogeology education, while initiatives such as The Groundwater Project, which publishes free online textbooks in multiple languages, help ensure that students who cannot attend in-person classes are not excluded. As universities continue to expand online offerings in pursuit of new audiences, the essay’s central warning is clear: online tools can enrich groundwater education, but only if the field’s irreplaceable practical, field-based, and interpersonal dimensions, and the students least served by digital delivery, are deliberately protected.

Subject of Research: The transition of hydrogeology education to online delivery during the COVID-19 pandemic and its implications for teaching quality and equity

Article Title: Preventing a groundwater divide: Ensuring quality hydrogeology education for all in the age of online coursework following the COVID-19 pandemic

Article References: Currell, M. (2026). Preventing a groundwater divide: Ensuring quality hydrogeology education for all in the age of online coursework following the COVID-19 pandemic. Hydrogeology Journal. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10040-026-03162-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10040-026-03162-8

Keywords: hydrogeology education, groundwater, online learning, COVID-19 pandemic, fieldwork, MODFLOW, digital inequality, numerical modeling, virtual field trips, assessment, Australia, higher education