Sustainable groundwater management——problems and scientific tools

Groundwater is a strategic resource due to its usually high quality and perennial availability. However, groundwater management all over the world often lacks sustainability as evidenced by falling water tables, drying wetlands, increasing sea-water intrusion and general deterioration of water quality. As groundwater cannot be renewed artificially on a large scale, sustainable management of this resource is vital. A number of scientific tools are available to assist in his task. Three items are discussed here. They include methods for the determination of groundwater recharge, groundwater modeling including the estimation of its uncertainty, and thenterfacing to the socio-economic field. Generally the quality of water management work can be largely enhanced with new tools available, including remote sensing, digital terrain models, differential GPS, environmental tracers, automatic data collection, modeling and the coupling of models from different disciplines