Bio

Bio

Xander is a Killam, NSERC, and Canadian Space Agency Postdoctoral Fellow at IRES working with Mark Johnson. He is also a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University where he works with Simon Levin.

Broadly, his work couples geospatial data science methods with social-ecological system frameworks and focuses on global groundwater science and sustainability topics. His research aims to foreground groundwater sustainability as a transformative process that can underpin broader goals of social well-being, ecological integrity, social and environmental justice, and Earth system stability.

During his PhD at the University of Victoria and the Global Institute for Water Security, he developed the conceptual framing of groundwater-connected systems to center and better represent social-ecological system interactions with groundwater. Global-scale applications of the framing developed new landscape classes of groundwater systems, highlighted the role of groundwater in ecosystem protection, and identified global hotspots of freshwater change. 

At IRES, Xander is primarily working to evaluate the resilience of groundwater-dependent ecosystems to trends in groundwater storage across land use and policy contexts at the global scale. He also co-leads an international research collective on large-scale freshwater resilience. 

Featured publications

Huggins, X., Gleeson, T., Villholth, K. et al. Groundwaterscapes: A global classification and mapping of groundwater’s large-scale socioeconomic, ecological, and Earth system functions. Water Resources Research (2024 – in press).

Rohde, M.M., Albano, C.M., Huggins, X. et al. Groundwater-dependent ecosystem map exposes global dryland protection needs. Nature 632, 101–107 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07702-8 

Huggins, X., Gleeson, T., Serrano, D. et al. Overlooked risks and opportunities in groundwatersheds of the world’s protected areas. Nature Sustainability 6, 855–864 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-023-01086-9
Huggins, X., Gleeson, T., Castilla-Rho, J., et al. Groundwater Connections and Sustainability in Social-Ecological Systems. Groundwater 61, 463-478 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1111/gwat.13305