Environmental Tracers to Study the Origin and Timescales of Spring Waters

Editorial: Advances and emerging methods in tracer hydrogeology

“…An ideal hydrological tracer is either conservative or representative of the process we are interested in, readily measurable, and able to inform critical variables and parameters of the models that we use to manage our water resources. Environmental gas tracers such as dissolved noble gases, for example, function as near-ideal tracers of groundwater residence times, mixing and flow paths (Suckow and Gerber, 2022); however, challenges related to the efficient and accurate measurement of environmental gas tracers and the incorporation of these data into quantitative models have held back their usage. Additionally, there has been little research on the evaluation of the information content (or data worth) of more recently emerging tracers, limiting our understanding of their true potential.…”