Beyond the surface: exploring social challenges in groundwater community monitoring implementation

The key tool for any groundwater manager is a network of piezometers for monitoring water levels in both unconfined and confined aquifers. This information, when generated at an appropriate time step and spatial scale, facilitates the assessment of annual recharge, tracking long-term stock depletion, modeling and estimating sustainable extraction limits, understanding aquifer-river interactions, implementing usage restriction measures, and evaluating their effectiveness. Unfortunately, most existing monitoring networks suffer from insufficient spatial density, primarily due to a lack of public agency resources. This has led to experimenting with citizen science and community monitoring approaches for water level data production. Despite the success highlighted in the literature, challenges in convincing users to engage in sensitive data-sharing are often overlooked. Based on a social science approach, this communication explores trust-building, technical measures, and data-sharing modalities, examining an experiment conducted by the authors in Northern Morocco.