Digital Twins for Sustainable Groundwater Resources Management: From Monitoring and Prediction to Governance and Resilience—A Review

Abstract

This article presents a scoping review of the literature on digital twins (DTs) for sustainable groundwater resources management, which constitutes a very recent and rapidly expanding research field, with literature moving quickly from conceptual frameworks to application-oriented systems. The literature, selected through the PRISMA 2020 methodology, is organized into seven sub-topics: AI and ML foundations, digital twin architectures and frameworks, aquifer-scale DT applications, agricultural and water–energy–food (WEF) nexus DTs, basin and urban water DTs, sensing, monitoring and IoT infrastructures, and governance, resilience and socio-hydrology. This structure shows how the field is shifting from monitoring and prediction toward integrated decision support, where process-based models, machine learning surrogates, real-time sensing and optimization are combined to support drought mitigation, saltwater intrusion control, irrigation management, climate adaptation and basin-scale planning. Across the reviewed studies, the most recurrent contributions are the construction of hybrid model architectures, the use of DTs to close the loop between observation and control, and the growing recognition that groundwater management must incorporate governance, stakeholder decision-making and socio-hydrological feedbacks. At the same time, the literature still faces key limitations, especially uncertainty quantification, interoperability between models and data streams, transferability to data-scarce settings and limited validation under real operational conditions. Future research should therefore focus on physics-informed and explainable AI, federated and scalable DT architectures, stronger coupling with socio-hydrological and governance frameworks, and more field-tested implementations that can demonstrate robust performance across diverse hydrogeological and institutional contexts.