Publications

Mattia Saccò, Xander Huggins, Alejandro Martínez, Robert Reinecke. 2025. Collaborative Science for Groundwater Biodiversity Conservation. Groundwater. https://doi.org/10.1111/gwat.13495

Depletion and quality degradation of groundwater ecosystems trigger impacts on diverse, highly specialized, and often locally endemic biota, ranging from microbes to cavefish. The extent to which groundwater ecosystems are threatened is alarming: underground biological extinction is already happening (Humphreys 2022 ). The full breadth of this challenge is unknown, yet the large-scale and widespread depletion and quality deg...

Matti Kummu, Xander Huggins, Daniel Chrisendo, Venla Niva, Veera Saarenheimo, Vilma Sandström, Sina Masoumzadeh Sayyar. 2025. Unveiling global humanscapes: harmonised subnational socio-economic datasets for understanding societal changes and enhancing risk assessments. EGU. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-21201

One of the bottlenecks in global risk assessment studies is the lack of global sub-national socio-economic datasets spanning the past decades. To bridge this gap, we have compiled 12 global sub-national socio-economic datasets covering cultural diversity, economic conditions, demographics, equity, governance, health, and social well-being. These datasets form a harmonised global socio-economic data cube with annual data for 19...

Xander Huggins. 2025. A review of open data for studying global groundwater in social-ecological systems. EGU. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-20627

Global data have served an integral role in characterizing large-scale groundwater systems, identifying their sustainability challenges, and informing on socioeconomic and ecological dimensions of groundwater. These insights have revealed groundwater as a dynamic component of both the water cycle and social-ecological systems, leading to an expansion in groundwater science that increasingly focuses on interactions between grou...

Xander Huggins, Melissa M. Rohde. 2025. Groundwater-dependent ecosystem map exposes global dryland protection needs. EGU. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-14986

Groundwater’s role in supporting ecosystems worldwide is rarely acknowledged. Groundwater-dependent ecosystems (GDEs), which depend on groundwater for some or all of their water needs, are diverse and include desert springs, mountain meadows and streams, coastal wetlands and forests. However, the location of these ecosystems worldwide has been largely unknown, hindering our ability to track impacts, establish protective polici...