Front. Earth Sci. Frontiers in Earth Science Front. Earth Sci. 2296-6463 Frontiers Media S.A. 1379392 10.3389/feart.2024.1379392 Earth Science Editorial Editorial: New tools and techniques for advanced water resource management Krishan et al. 10.3389/feart.2024.1379392 Krishan Gopal 1 * † Mishra P. K. 1 Sahoo Debabrata 2 Gagnon Alexandre S. 3 † 1 National Institute of Hydrology, Roorkee, India 2 Department of Agricultural Sciences, College of Agricultural, Forest, and Life Sciences, Clemson University, Clemson, SC, United States 3 School of Biological and Environmental Sciences James Parsons Building, Liverpool, United Kingdom

Edited and reviewed by: Wouter Buytaert, Imperial College London, United Kingdom

 *Correspondence: Gopal Krishan, drgopal.krishan@gmail.com

These authors have contributed equally to this work

 21 03 2024 2024 12 1379392 31 01 2024 11 03 2024 Copyright © 2024 Krishan, Mishra, Sahoo and Gagnon. 2024 Krishan, Mishra, Sahoo and Gagnon

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 Editorial on the Research Topic New tools and techniques for advanced water resource management water resources tools and techniques management sustainability water quality section-at-acceptance Hydrosphere Background

Water is essential for human health, agriculture, industrial processes, and ecological balance. However, the growing global population and the urge for continuous economic development have increased the pressure on water quality (Lapworth et al., 2018), leading to water scarcity in many regions of the world (MacDonald et al., 2016). Several factors contribute to quality water scarcity, including over-extraction of groundwater (Shamsuddua et al., 2011; MacAllister et al., 2022), inefficient water management practices, climate change, and unregulated disposal of waste into the waterbodies. Water pollution is a significant challenge, as it can degrade the quality of the limited freshwater sources, making them unsafe for human consumption and harmful to ecosystems.

Degradation of water resources by salinity (Krishan et al., 2021), emerging pollutants (Lapworth et al., 2018), and legacy contaminants from point and non-point sources, are an increasingly critical issue. This concern has also been raised by various agencies including the United States Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA). There have been already an acute water scarcity and polluting these resources will be alarming for the sustainability of these resources.

There is an urgent need to find the recharge sources and recharge zone of groundwater so that the water levels in aquifers can be managed by increasing the water levels. This can be done through fingerprinting of water and getting estimates of groundwater residence times by the use of environmental isotopes or environmental tracers (Lapworth et al., 2015; Krishan et al., 2021; 2023). The isotope techniques can also be used in the groundwater pollution studies (Krishan et al., 2021; 2022).

Globally, there is an urgent need to find sustainable solutions to the increasing scarcity of freshwater resources. With more advanced tools and techniques for assessing water resources and water quality, including Artificial Neural Networks (Lohani and Krishan, 2015), Machine Learning (Ghobadi and Kang, 2023), and Artificial Intelligence (Chang et al., 2023), there are possibilities to evaluate water-related issues and find the proper optimal management solutions for their sustainability.

This Research Topic contributes to the global challenge of achieving water security by presenting new insights and tools that can strengthen water management and policy. The studies cover a wide range of topics as below:

(i) Mihu-Pintilie et al. assess the groundwater pollution potential by ethnoarchaeological evidence based saline groundwater sources in the Eastern Carpathians and Sub-Carpathians area of Romania. This study is on saline groundwater sources and will be very much useful, since worldwide this issue has been discussed at various forums. Groundwater salinity has been observed in inland as well coastal aquifers.

(ii) Xiao et al. carried out study on age dating of stream water to understand various watershed hydrological processes and biogeochemical cycle. From age dating in addition to various components of hydrological cycle, we find the residence time of the water and is useful to the water managers and policymakers.

(iii) Thomas et al. in their study found that offshore freshened groundwater as a potential unconventional water in coastal city of Shanghai;

(iv) Gladish et al. in their study assessed and managed contamination risks and health hazards in mining areas. Authors found that mining is done at various scales and there is need to carry out the risk assessment along with studying the environment impacts.

(v) Day-Lewis et al. carried out a study on spatial distribution using quantification of hydrologic exchange flows for monitoring dam-regulated rivers. It was observed that to manage the overflows as well as water scarcity, one need to understand the spatial distribution as well as monitoring of the rivers to maintain environment flows.

This Research Topic culminates in the reputation to achieve water security and espousing aims to allow end-users to meet this societal challenge. It is a compendium of research articles on water crisis assessment, managing surface and groundwater resources, isotope dating tools supplementing hydrological valuation, and other issues and its sustainable attenuation through ingenious ideas and technologies that will be highly useful to the stakeholders, water managers, policymakers and academicians.

 Author contributions

GK: Writing–original draft, Writing–review and editing. PM: Writing–review and editing. DS: Writing–review and editing. AG: Writing–review and editing.

 Funding

The author(s) declare that financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This work was supported by the National Institute of Hydrology, Roorkee.

As the guest editors of the Research Topic, we are thankful for the support of the Editor in Chief of the journal and Frontiers’ specialist team. We are incredibly grateful to all the reviewers who provided valuable comments that ensured the high quality of the accepted papers. We highly acknowledge all authors who contributed to this Research Topic.

 Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

 Publisher’s note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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