A socio-hydrological assessment of spatial communities in an aquifer through groundwater modeling and social network analysis

Study region: The Isfahan-Borkhar aquifer in central Iran, an arid region, faces severe groundwater decline, threatening local communities reliant on agriculture. Study focus: This study proposes a novel approach to socio-hydrological decision-making by integrating distributed groundwater modeling with Social Network Analysis. The method examines both the relationships between communities and their interactions with the aquifer. Model outputs across nine time steps were combined, with stakeholder connections derived from their geographical proximity and water use patterns. The most influential communities were identified and analyzed from three perspectives: inter-community relations, intra-community structure, and aquifer conditions. A meta-graph representation is constructed and classified into different groups, each showing varied responses to the 2014 water withdrawal restrictions and to ongoing groundwater depletion. New hydrological insights for the region: The results revealed severe groundwater depletion in the study area, with an average decline of approximately 10 m over a 9-year period, and local depletion rates reaching up to 25 m. A significant finding was the paradoxical relationship between consumption and depletion: communities exhibiting the lowest levels of local depletion were frequently the highest consumers, indicating that intensive usage in specific areas severely compromises the overall aquifer status. Furthermore, meta-graph analysis demonstrated that these high-consumption communities suffer from a lack of betweenness, leading to social isolation and limited awareness of the hydrological consequences of their actions.