Spatiotemporal Dimensions of Water Stress Accounting: Incorporating Groundwater–Surface Water Interactions and Ecological Thresholds

Coarse temporal (i.e., annual) and spatial (i.e., watershed) scales camouflage water stress associated with withdrawals from surface water and groundwater sources. To address this “curse of scale”, we developed a framework to characterize water stress at different time scales and at fine spatial scales that have not been explored before. Our framework incorporates surface water–groundwater interactions by accounting for spatially cumulative...