The study explored the role of serious gaming in strengthening stakeholder engagement in addressing human–water challenges. The gaming approach guided community discussions toward implementable decisions. The results showed increased active participation, knowledge gain, and use of plural pronouns. We observed decreased individual interests and conflicts among game participants. The study presents important implications for creating a collective basis for water resources management.

Determining water transit times in aquifers is key to a better understanding of groundwater resources and their sustainable management. For our research, we used high-accuracy tritium data from 35 springs draining the Luxembourg Sandstone aquifer. We assessed the mean transit times of groundwater and found that water moves on average more than 10 times more slowly vertically in the vadose zone of the aquifer (~12 m yr^-1) than horizontally in its saturated zone (~170 m yr^-1).

Knowledge of extreme precipitation probability at various spatial–temporal scales is crucial. We estimate extreme precipitation return levels at multiple scales (10 min–24 h, 0.25–500 km²) in the eastern Mediterranean using radar data. We show our estimates are comparable to those derived from averaged daily rain gauges. We then explore multi-scale extreme precipitation across coastal, mountainous, and desert regions.

An introduced high-resolution soil moisture monitoring framework combines a 1D water balance model, real-time meteorological data, and a national soil database to present point-based operational data with a user-friendly web platform. Its significance lies in the improvement of forest management by making informed, local-scale decisions crucial for mitigating climate change impacts. In the paper, we present a technical description and validation of the framework and showcase its features.

The local performance plays a critical part in practical applications of global streamflow reanalysis. This paper develops a decomposition approach to evaluating streamflow analysis at different timescales. The reanalysis is observed to be more effective in characterizing seasonal, annual and multi-annual features than daily, weekly and monthly features. Also, the local performance is shown to be primarily influenced by precipitation seasonality, longitude, mean precipitation and mean slope.

The fall and flushing of new leaves in the miombo woodlands co-occur in the dry season before the commencement of seasonal rainfall. The miombo species are also said to have access to soil moisture in deep soils, including groundwater in the dry season. Satellite-based evaporation estimates, temporal trends, and magnitudes differ the most in the dry season, most likely due to inadequate understanding and representation of the highlighted miombo species attributes in simulations.

The evaluation of model performance is essential for hydrological modeling. Using performance criteria requires a deep understanding of their properties. We focus on a counterintuitive aspect of the Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE) and show that if we divide the data into multiple parts, the overall performance can be higher than all the evaluations of the subsets. Although this follows from the definition of the NSE, the resulting behavior can have unintended consequences in practice.