Little Kathleen E, Hayashi Masaki, Liang Steve
Department of Geoscience, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada.
Right-of-Way Planning Department, ATCO Electric Ltd, Edmonton, Canada.
Ground Water. 2016 May;54(3):317-24. doi: 10.1111/gwat.12336. Epub 2015 Mar 30.
Water level monitoring provides essential information about the condition of aquifers and their responses to water extraction, land-use change, and climatic variability. It is important to have a spatially distributed, long-term monitoring well network for sustainable groundwater resource management. Community-based monitoring involving citizen scientists provides an approach to complement existing government-run monitoring programs. This article demonstrates the feasibility of establishing a large-scale water level monitoring network of private water supply wells using an example from Rocky View County (3900 km(2) ) in Alberta, Canada. In this network, community volunteers measure the water level in their wells, and enter these data through a web-based data portal, which allows the public to view and download these data. The close collaboration among the university researchers, county staff members, and community volunteers enabled the successful implementation and operation of the network for a 5-year pilot period, which generated valuable data sets. The monitoring program was accompanied by education and outreach programs, in which the educational materials on groundwater were developed in collaboration with science teachers from local schools. The methodology used in this study can be easily adopted by other municipalities and watershed stewardship groups interested in groundwater monitoring. As governments are starting to rely increasingly on local municipalities and conservation authorities for watershed management and planning, community-based groundwater monitoring provides an effective and affordable tool for sustainable water resources management.
水位监测为含水层状况及其对抽水、土地利用变化和气候变异性的响应提供了重要信息。建立一个空间分布的长期监测井网络对于可持续的地下水资源管理至关重要。由公民科学家参与的基于社区的监测提供了一种补充现有政府运营监测项目的方法。本文以加拿大艾伯塔省落基维尤县（3900平方公里）为例，展示了建立一个大规模私人供水井水位监测网络的可行性。在这个网络中，社区志愿者测量他们井中的水位，并通过一个基于网络的数据门户输入这些数据，公众可以查看和下载这些数据。大学研究人员、县工作人员和社区志愿者之间的密切合作使得该网络在为期5年的试点期内得以成功实施和运行，产生了有价值的数据集。监测项目还伴随着教育和推广项目，其中关于地下水的教育材料是与当地学校的科学教师合作编写的。本研究中使用的方法很容易被其他对地下水监测感兴趣的市政当局和流域管理组织采用。随着政府开始越来越依赖地方市政当局和保护机构进行流域管理和规划，基于社区的地下水监测为可持续水资源管理提供了一种有效且经济实惠的工具。
