WRRC Water Webinar Focuses on Transboundary Aquifers
On March 28, 2025, the WRRC hosted a water webinar, titled Prioritizing Transboundary Aquifers in the Arizona-Sonora Region, which featured Elia Tapia, a faculty professor at Universidad de Sonora in Hermosillo, Mexico. In her presentation, Tapia detailed a prioritization process for evaluating the conditions of US-Mexico transboundary aquifers, a tool for optimizing resource allocation for regional groundwater research and policy. The prioritization process development drew on her work with the Transboundary Aquifer Assessment Program (TAAP), a bi-national effort to study shared aquifers. Tapia’s clear and detailed slides illustrated the aquifer evaluation’s focus on population density, groundwater availability, and transboundary connectivity using publicly available data.
Tapia’s career highlights include expertise in applied hydrology, hydrogeology, climate change, and disaster risk assessment. She has also contributed to projects for private and public institutions across the US, Latin America, and the Caribbean. A recently published article in the journal Water features the transboundary aquifer prioritization study, written by Tapia and coauthors WRRC Director Sharon B. Megdal and Chief Research Scientist Eylon Shamir of San Diego’s Hydrologic Research Center.