A review of open data for studying global groundwater in social-ecological systems

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 groundwater with ecological, socioeconomic, and Earth systems. This shift presents many opportunities that are conditional on broader, more interdisciplinary system conceptualizations, models, and methods that require the integration of a greater diversity of data in contrast to conventional hydrogeological investigations. Here, we identify and review over 140 global open access datasets and dataset collections that span elements of the hydrosphere, biosphere, climate, lithosphere, food systems, governance, management, in addition to other human dimensions and socioeconomic systems relevant to groundwater science.