Canada requires a national groundwater monitoring system that supports a holistic water cycle understanding and analysis. Currently, groundwater remains the most underrepresented component at the national scale. While provincial networks operate at watershed and regional levels, they could benefit from shared knowledge and harmonization toward shared findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability (FAIR). Recent engagement with Environment and Climate Change Canada and the Canada Water Agency indicates strong public support for a federal role in advancing national groundwater monitoring. This session solicits presentations from government, academia, and NGOs that will share groundwater monitoring experiences, opportunities and shortcomings. Contributions may include innovations in the design, operation, and implementation of regional and watershed-scale networks, data standardization and integration, remote sensing and Earth observation, machine learning, community-based approaches, and case studies of network optimization. The overall aim of this session is to foster dialogue on how regional and national perspectives can be bridged to support groundwater assessment, management, and policy, and to help advance discussions about what a future national groundwater monitoring system might look like.

• 2:00 pm – 2:15 pm | Toward Coordinated Groundwater Monitoring in Canada – Cynthia McClain
• 2:15 pm – 2:30 pm | Crises in Canada’s water monitoring, fragmentation and isolation: A need for a water cycle approach – Hazen Russell
• 2:30 pm – 2:45 pm | Modernizing Manitoba’s Groundwater Monitoring: Status, Constraints, and the Case for a National Framework – Zijian Wang
• 2:45 pm – 3:00 pm | Building a Community-Based Groundwater Monitoring Program in Alberta’s Oldman Watershed – Maggie Finkle-Aucoin
• 3:00 pm – 3:15 pm | Prioritizing aquifers for long-term monitoring within the Upper Columbia River Basin, British Columbia, Canada – Mike Wei
• 3:15 pm – 3:30 pm | Optimizing Groundwater Monitoring Networks Using Time-Series Clustering and Groundwater-Surface Water Interaction Analysis in Alberta – Piyush Yadav