GIS Case Study
Groundwater Well Monitoring Platform — Ground Water Information System
A groundwater well health monitoring and analysis platform for a national water resources authority.
Domain
Groundwater Monitoring / Water Resources
Role
Frontend GIS Developer
At A Glance
What Makes It Work
Borehole inventory mapped and classified by well use and status
Attribute tables, graph analysis and statistical reporting
Vector-tile mapping over satellite imagery with OpenLayers
Administrative-area drill-down from country to district level
Knowing what the boreholes are doing
A national water resources authority held records for thousands of boreholes, location, depth, elevation, use classification, monitoring status, across spreadsheets, a legacy database and field reports. Answering a question as basic as how many active irrigation wells there are in a given district meant a manual reconciliation exercise. Trend questions, such as whether water levels in a region were falling, were effectively unanswerable at scale. The platform was commissioned to bring the borehole inventory onto one map with the analysis tools needed to turn a register into a monitoring capability: classify wells, drill down administratively, chart the data, and produce statistical reports without a GIS specialist in the loop.
Inventory, drill-down, analysis
The front end is React with OpenLayers as the map engine, rendering vector tiles and GeoJSON over satellite imagery. The borehole layer is classified by use, domestic, commercial, irrigation, monitoring, and by status, with the layer catalogue covering administrative boundaries, boreholes, monitoring networks and supporting context. The administrative-area explorer drills from country to province to district, and at each level the platform reports borehole counts and summary statistics for that area, which is the question the authority most often needed to answer quickly. The attribute table carries borehole ID, name, elevation, depth and the monitoring fields, with sorting and filtering. Graph analysis plots time-series readings for selected wells, and the statistical reporting module produces the aggregations the authority publishes. Distance and area measurement plus feature statistics round out the analysis tools. The design intent was that an authority officer could go from a district name to a chart of its monitoring wells in a few clicks.
A register that became a monitoring tool
The change for the authority was less about the map than about the questions it could now ask. Regional trends that were previously a research project are a filtered chart. Reporting that took days of reconciliation is a module. Field teams can see which wells in their district are due for monitoring and which are stale. The engineering emphasis was on getting the data model right before the visualisation, a borehole is a point with a history, not just a point, and that is where most of the effort in this kind of data engineering work belongs. The map is the visible part; the classification and time-series structure underneath is what made it useful.
Capabilities
Core Functionality
Borehole layer classified as domestic, commercial, irrigation, municipal, geotechnical, exploratory, decommissioned, environmental-monitoring and mining wells
Layer catalogue: administrative boundary, boreholes, monitoring boreholes, land cover, land use, water quality, aquifer, geology, hydrology, rainfall & climate, population
Attribute table with borehole ID, name, elevation, depth, formation and source
Administrative-area explorer with per-district borehole listings
Distance and area measurement plus feature statistics
Dynamic legend, custom symbology and basemap switching
Search by location name or by coordinates; data export and sharing
Technologies
Tools & Stack
Product
From The Working Application
Questions
Frequently Asked Questions
How are boreholes classified on the map?
By use, domestic, commercial, irrigation and monitoring, and by status, with symbology driven by both. The classification comes from the authority's own records and can be extended with additional categories if the register uses them.
Can we get statistics for a specific district?
Yes. The administrative-area explorer drills from national to district level and reports borehole counts and summary statistics for the selected area, along with the ability to chart monitoring readings for the wells within it.
Does it show water-level trends over time?
Yes, for wells with monitoring readings. Graph analysis plots the time series for selected boreholes, and the statistical reporting module aggregates readings by area and period for the reports the authority publishes.
Why OpenLayers rather than Mapbox for this project?
The deployment requirements favoured a fully open-source stack with no external tile or API dependencies, and OpenLayers handles both vector tiles and GeoJSON over imagery well. The choice of map engine on our projects follows the constraints, not a house preference.
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