Groundwater is considered a reliable resource, relatively insensitive to seasonal or even multi-year climatic variation; however, quantifying aquifer-scale estimates of stress in diverse hydrologic environments is particularly difficult due to data scarcity and the limited methods for deriving stress parameters, such as groundwater use and availability, which can be applied over a large spatial area. On a global scale, most methods focus on one major sector, such as irrigated agriculture which accounts for a substantial portion of groundwater use on a global-scale. However, this may misrepresent groundwater abstractions in regions significantly impacted by other sectors on a local-scale. The objective of this paper is to quantify annual average groundwater use through a multi-method sectoral approach for regions where groundwater abstraction data are scarce. Sectoral methods are developed for the annual volumetric quantification and spatial distribution of groundwater use for municipal water distribution systems, private domestic well users in municipal and rural regions, industrial use for manufacturing, mining, and oil and gas industries, irrigated agriculture, and finfish aquaculture. Results suggest that British Columbia (BC) uses a total of ∼562 million cubic metres of groundwater annually. The largest annual groundwater use by major sector is agriculture (38%), finfish aquaculture (21%), industrial (16%), municipal water distribution systems (15%), and domestic private well users (11%). This paper highlights the implications of using downscaled values of groundwater use from global datasets for aquifer-scale estimates, which can be misrepresentative in regions where groundwater use is unregulated or newly regulated, as is the case in BC. The sectoral methods developed in this paper provide a framework for estimating groundwater-specific use estimates in data scarce regions critical for groundwater management plans and aquifer-scale groundwater stress studies which depend on spatially-distributed groundwater use data.

地下水被认为是可靠的资源，对季节性甚至多年的气候变化相对不敏感；但是，由于数据稀缺以及推导应力参数（例如地下水的使用和可利用性）的方法有限，这种方法难以量化各种水文环境中的含水层规模的应力估计，这尤其适用于大面积区域。在全球范围内，大多数方法都集中在一个主要部门，例如灌溉农业，在全球范围内占地下水使用量的很大一部分。但是，这可能代表了当地其他部门受到严重影响的地区的地下水抽取。本文的目的是通过多方法部门方法对缺乏地下水提取数据的地区进行量化，以量化年度平均地下水使用量。开发了部门方法，用于市政供水系统，市政和农村地区的私人家庭井用户，制造业，采矿业，石油和天然气工业的工业用途，灌溉农业和有鳍水产养殖业的地下水的年度体积量化和空间分布。结果表明，不列颠哥伦比亚省（BC）每年总共使用约5.62亿立方米的地下水。主要部门的年度地下水使用量最大的是农业（38％），有鳍水产养殖（21％），工业（16％），市政供水系统（15％）和家庭私人水井使用者（11％）。本文着重指出了使用全球数据集的地下水使用量下调值进行含水层规模估算的含义，这在BC省的地下水使用不受管制或新受管制的地区可能是错误的。本文开发的部门方法提供了一个框架，用于估算在数据稀缺区域中对地下水管理计划和含水层规模的地下水压力研究至关重要的数据特定区域中的地下水特定利用估计值，这些研究依赖于空间分布的地下水使用数据。