Seeing China's Invisible Groundwater: Advances and Challenges

Abstract In 2021, China adopted comprehensive “Groundwater Management Regulations” to address critical groundwater issues, building upon the foundation of a national groundwater monitoring network established by 2020. This commentary reviews the development of China's National Groundwater Monitoring Network, examines its current monitoring capacity, and highlights ongoing groundwater issues and related ecological and environmental challenges. The network now comprises over 20,000 monitoring wells across 10 major river basins in China. Despite this progress, three key challenges persist in advancing groundwater knowledge: (a) insufficient data from the Tibetan Plateau, a crucial headwater region for many of Asia's major rivers; (b) limited understanding of how groundwater systems affect ecohydrological processes and ecosystem services; and (c) the identification and mitigation of environmental geological hazards driven by groundwater changes. We advocate for the integration of the groundwater observational data with physics‐based groundwater models, artificial intelligence, and deep learning techniques to deepen our understanding of these complex, largely hidden groundwater systems, providing critical insights for both scientific research and regulatory decision‐making.