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Groundwater and Its Role in Maintaining the Ecological Functions of Ecosystems—A Review

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Intensified Land and Water Use

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Abstract

Groundwater dependent ecosystems (GDEs) constitute one of the largest environments at the global level. In general, they are not easy to perceive, however in recent years, it has been found that they can contain high diversity of living forms with particular adaptive characteristics suggesting that the water quality is maintained and particular ecological functions providing numerous services to mankind. Due to the increasing need of natural elements and the intensive and unplanned land use in the last years, which has led to environmental degradation and diverse social conflicts, studies on groundwater and ecosystems, or the ecology of groundwater are gaining momentum. Thus, holistic perspectives are encouraged to properly understand GDEs’s connections, their functional roles and visualize proper management perspectives under different scenarios of global change. In this chapter, the following questions are addressed: (i) why is there a need of an integrated view of groundwater? (ii) what are the ecological values and services of groundwater? (iii) what is known about the connection between ecosystems and groundwater? (iv) which will be the effects of decoupling the connectivity between surface water–groundwater ecosystems? (v) may their functions and services be assessed and valued? and (vi) what are the implications for management?

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centro de Investigación en Biodiversidad y Conservación, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos, Avenida Universidad 1001, Col. Chamilpa, 62209, Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico

    Elisabet Verònica Wehncke

  2. Instituto de Ambiente de Montaña y Regiones Áridas, Universidad Nacional de Chilecito, 9 de Julio 22, 5360, Chilecito, La Rioja, Argentina

    Néstor Alberto Mariano

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  1. Elisabet Verònica Wehncke
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Correspondence to Elisabet Verònica Wehncke .

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  1. Facultad Ciencias Agrarias y Forestales, National University of La Plata, La Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Margarita María Alconada-Magliano

ANNEX

ANNEX

Results obtained from an exhaustive review of the existing scientific literature in the Web of Science databases (https://www.webofknowledge.com/) that address the topic of groundwater and ecosystems (Reyes et al. 2016), show the state of the art that existed at least, until the middle of the year 2018. From this review it was evident that in recent years, the number of publications has been increasing, and this was attributed to the increase in recognition of the ecological value of groundwater flows (Bertrand et al. 2012). The years 2015 and 2017, had the largest number of publications (32 and 33, respectively). This is also a result of the increase in the development of mathematical modeling and computational tools, as well as the development needs of water and riparian ecosystem management and conservation plans in a sustainable way.

The search and selection of articles was structured according to 25 research areas (Table 4.2). For the search we combined the words “Groundwater flow” and “Ecosystems” and “Landscapes”.

Table 4.2 List of research areas selected for the bibliographic review
Full size table

After classifying and coding the information according to the year of publication, country/region and study area, among other characteristics we found a total of 320 publications as of August 26, 2018, of which 306 were used for the study (unpublished data).The oldest article dates from 1989 (Ryszkowski 1989), and the United States is the country with the largest number of publications (139 publications), followed by Australia (20 publications) and Sweden (18 publications). Regarding the number of publications found according to 25 different research areas, Environmental Sciences Ecology studies had 197 publications, followed by Water Resources studies with 93, Geology with 71 and Freshwater Biology with 51. Finally, to know how often certain keywords appear in publications, 564 different keywords were determined where Groundwater appears in 69 publications, followed by Modeling with 51, Wetlands with 36 and Landscape with 33.

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Wehncke, E.V., Mariano, N.A. (2021). Groundwater and Its Role in Maintaining the Ecological Functions of Ecosystems—A Review. In: Alconada-Magliano, M.M. (eds) Intensified Land and Water Use. Springer Earth System Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65443-6_4

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