Xander HugginsUniversity of British Columbia | UBC
Xander Huggins
Doctor of Philosophy
About
23
Publications
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Introduction
I'm a postdoctoral research fellow at UBC and Princeton.
I'm interested in studying groundwater as a social-ecological system, identifying complex adaptive system properties in these systems, and generating insights that relate to global groundwater sustainability topics.
Publications
Publications (23)
Increasing climatic and human pressures are changing the world's water resources and hydrological processes at unprecedented rates. Understanding these changes requires comprehensive monitoring of water resources. Hydrogeodesy, the science that measures the Earth's solid and aquatic surfaces, gravity field, and their changes over time, delivers a r...
Groundwater is a dynamic component of the global water cycle with important social, economic, ecological, and Earth system functions. We present a new global classification and mapping of groundwater systems, which we call groundwaterscapes, that represent predominant configurations of large‐scale groundwater system functions. We identify and map 1...
Groundwater is the most ubiquitous source of liquid freshwater globally, yet its role in supporting diverse ecosystems is rarely acknowledged1,2. However, the location and extent of groundwater-dependent ecosystems (GDEs) are unknown in many geographies, and protection measures are lacking1,3. Here, we map GDEs at high-resolution (roughly 30 m) and...
Groundwater is the most ubiquitous source of liquid freshwater globally, yet its role in supporting diverse ecosystems is rarely acknowledged1,2. However, the location and extent of groundwater-dependent ecosystems (GDEs) are unknown in many geographies, and protection measures are lacking1,3. Here, we map GDEs at high-resolution (roughly 30 m) and...
Groundwater is a dynamic component of the global water cycle with important social, economic, ecological, and Earth system functions. We present a new global classification and mapping of groundwater systems, which we call groundwaterscapes, that represent predominant configurations of large-scale groundwater system functions. We identify 18 ground...
Managing groundwater is challenging because its below-ground existence makes the resource difficult to monitor. GRACE is an important tool as it provides the opportunity to monitor the storage of groundwater. While GRACE-based groundwater studies have focused on many regions across the globe, studies that link scientific research to policymaking an...
Groundwater sustainability is challenged by the difference between legal and scientific understanding of groundwater, as well as the lack of focused attention to regulatory design in the literature on groundwater institutions, governance and management. The purpose of this paper is to use the scientific characteristics of groundwater to direct the...
Protected areas are a key tool for conserving biodiversity, sustaining ecosystem services and improving human well-being. Global initiatives that aim to expand and connect protected areas generally focus on controlling ‘above ground’ impacts such as land use, overlooking the potential for human actions in adjacent areas to affect protected areas th...
Groundwater resources are connected with social, economic, ecological, and Earth systems. We introduce the framing of groundwater‐connected systems to better represent the nature and complexity of these connections in data collection, scientific investigations, governance and management approaches, and groundwater education. Groundwater‐connected s...
The freshwater ecosystems around the world are degrading, such that maintaining environmental flowEnvironmental flow (EF): “The quantity, timing, and quality of water flows required to sustain freshwater and estuarine ecosystems and the human livelihoods and well-being that depend on these ecosystems.” – Arthington et al. (2018).
(EF) in river netw...
Protected areas are a key tool for conserving biodiversity, sustaining ecosystem services and improving human well-being. Global initiatives that aim to expand and connect protected areas generally focus on controlling ‘above ground’ impacts such as land use, overlooking the potential for human actions in adjacent areas to affect protected areas th...
Groundwater sustainability is challenged by the difference between legal and scientific understanding of groundwater as well as the lack of focused attention to regulatory design in the literature on groundwater institutions, governance and management. The purpose of this paper is to use groundwater science to direct the necessary elements of regul...
Groundwater is embedded in social and ecological systems but the complexity of these interactions is not well represented in conventional approaches to study and promote groundwater sustainability. We argue an important shift is necessary in groundwater sustainability thinking: towards prioritizing the functions of groundwater, and the services tha...
The freshwater ecosystems around the world are degrading, such that maintaining environmental flow (EF) in river networks is critical to their preservation. The relationship between streamflow alterations and, respectively, EF violations, and freshwater biodiversity is well established at the scale of stream reaches or small basins (~<100 km2). How...
The United Nations World Water Development Report 2022 ‘Groundwater: Making the invisible visible’, 89-100, https://www.unwater.org/publications/un-world-water-development-report-2022/
Humans and ecosystems are deeply connected to, and through, the hydrological cycle. However, impacts of hydrological change on social and ecological systems are infrequently evaluated together at the global scale. Here, we focus on the potential for social and ecological impacts from freshwater stress and storage loss. We find basins with existing...
Quantifying physical water security at the global scale remains hampered by a lack of systematically produced observational data. Here we combine the observed trends in global freshwater availability from the recently completed Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellite mission1 with more than a dozen other global datasets and provide the mi...
Porewater exchange is an important yet poorly understood component of the coastal carbon cycle. Here, a high-resolution automated radon (²²²Rn, a natural porewater tracer) and CO2 time series was conducted in the Squamish Central Estuary (Canada) over eight consecutive tidal cycles to assess the relative importance of porewater exchange on estuarin...
Groundwater pumping depletes streamflow, which can have significant ecological impacts depending on the magnitude of depletion relative to environmental flow needs. Streamflow depletion estimates from groundwater pumping have been quantified using both analytical and numerical methods, but are not routinely compared to environmental flow needs or u...