This work also benefited from funding from The Royal Society, EC-FP7 (#282759) “VUELCO”, and the NERC [NE/E007961/1]. Hughes publishes with the permission of the Executive Director of BGS (NERC). The authors would also like to thank Nicolas Fournier and Steve Ingebritsen for insightful and constructive reviews that have helped to improve the manuscript. “
“The Shallow Aquifer Assessment Selleck Cabozantinib Survey, a component of the California State Water Resources Control Board’s Groundwater Ambient Monitoring

Assessment program Priority Basin Project (GAMA), is focused on the study of groundwater used by individual households. Individual household wells (domestic wells) are usually shallower than public-supply wells, and are therefore more susceptible to contamination from the land surface, or from shallow underground contaminant sources such as leaking fuel or septic tanks. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) was tasked to identify where domestic wells are located in the state, and to identify and sample areas

with high densities of domestic-well users. This paper describes the Selleckchem GKT137831 methodology and results of the domestic-well survey, and the identification of high-density domestic-well areas. According to the 1990 decadal census, the last year the US Census surveyed drinking-water sources, 464,621 California households, equivalent to 1.2 million people were using domestic well water for their drinking water supply. The rest of the population (29.76 million at the time) relied upon a municipal source of water. The population of California reached 37.25 million in 2010. If the proportion of those using domestic wells is the same as in 1990, then over 1.5 million people obtained drinking water from domestic wells in 2010. The location of the 1.5 million people using domestic

well water, prior to the research presented here, has only been aggregated into the geographic boundaries of a census tract, some of which can be quite large in California (up to 19,295 km2). Simply distributing the population across the entire census tract would be a generalization that does not capture the ioxilan natural clustering of populations that occurs due to the physical, cultural, and economic geography of the landscape. Therefore a more accurate method of determining the location of households using domestic well water was needed. The California Department of Water Resources (DWR) keeps records of all types of wells drilled within the state in the form of Well Completion Reports (WCR) which are submitted to DWR by the well-drilling company. Some of these reports are in paper format only, however many have been digitally scanned. These files often contain a single scanned image of the driller’s log, but sometimes they also contain a cover page or accompanying material.