Community-Based Groundwater Monitoring Network Using a Citizen-Science Approach

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.