Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the second edition of Fundamentals of Groundwater, Schwartz and Zhang (2024) have done a commendable job of compiling a broad range of useful information within a single readable volume and providing supplementary materials. Like the first edition (Schwartz and Zhang 2003), the text is generally clearly written and illustrated and is thoroughly referenced. The revised table of contents and index are more detailed. One notable update is the inclusion of color figures, some of which have been redrafted from U.S. Geological Survey publications. Case studies, which are a strength of the book, remain focused mostly on the United States and Canada, but now also include the Indo-Gangetic basin of South Asia. The first two-thirds of the text are organized similarly to the first edition. Chapter 1 (Introduction to Groundwater) has been updated to include Schwartz's work on the maturation of hydrogeology as a discipline. Chapter 2 provides an overview of surface hydrologic processes. Chapters 3–8 encompass properties of porous media and groundwater flow; classifications of different types of aquifers; derivation of the continuity equation and flow net analysis; flow in unsaturated and fractured media; techniques of field investigations; and regional groundwater flow, recharge and discharge. The discussion of types of aquifers in Chapter 4 has been expanded, and Chapter 7 now includes information on airborne electromagnetic methods in place of seismic reflection. Chapters 9–13 address pumping tests in confined, leaky-confined, and unconfined aquifers; slug and other drawdown tests; and superposition and responses to pumping in bounded aquifers. The final third of the book has been revamped, with new chapters (14 and 15) on depletion of groundwater resources and groundwater management. Particularly welcome is the discussion of soil mechanics and land subsidence, which was not included in the first edition. Chapters 16–19 have been reorganized into Water Quality Assessment, Key Chemical Processes, Isotopes and Applications (which conveys the important concept that a groundwater sample may have an ensemble of ages rather than a single age), and Mass Transport: Principles and Examples. Chapter 20 (Introduction to Contaminant Hydrogeology) has been expanded. The student website includes resources that were available with the first edition (software for generating flow nets and for forward and inverse solutions of pumping tests, as well as a bonus chapter on modeling contaminant transport). There is a new Excel spreadsheet for solving aquifer test problems in a confined aquifer. The instructor companion site includes a password-protected solutions manual for questions, which are included at the end of most chapters. Shortcomings of the book are relatively minor. There are multiple typos, which generally do not interfere with the clarity of the text. I would encourage the authors to use the term potentiometric surface map to refer specifically to a confined aquifer, as opposed to a water table map for an unconfined aquifer. Drawing a distinction between the vadose zone (which includes the capillary fringe) and the unsaturated zone (which does not) would be helpful. Some of the text, particularly in the last third of the book, would benefit from updated references. For example, Section 17.6.2 (Microbial Ecology of the Subsurface) does not mention genomic analyses of groundwater or studies of microbial occurrence in deep subsurface (e.g., crystalline shield) rocks. The statement in Section 20.5.2 (Degradation of Common Contaminants) that no known bacteria can oxidize halogenated aliphatic compounds as a primary substrate is not true for vinyl chloride (Mattes et al. 2010). Lastly, on the student website, all the “Browse by Chapter” links simply duplicate the “Browse by Resource” links to the bonus chapter, the Excel spreadsheet, and the software files. At a time when The Groundwater Project (https://gw-project.org/) is making numerous books on various aspects of hydrogeology freely accessible, one may well wonder about the demand for a commercial textbook in hydrogeology, especially given the relatively recent updates of Applied Hydrogeology (Fetter and Kreamer 2022) and Groundwater Science (Fitts 2023). Nonetheless, the new edition of Fundamentals of Groundwater deserves serious consideration as a comprehensive, affordable text (e-book $96.00, print $119.95). It is well suited to a one- or two-semester introduction to hydrogeology at the advanced undergraduate or graduate level, and it would be a worthwhile investment for the practicing hydrogeologist. Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".