“Business as Usual,” But What Is Usual?

GWMR began its run in 1981. Under Editor-in-Chief David Nielson, Jay Lehr wrote an editorial in that first issue in which he anticipated the mission that the journal would pursue in the coming years, “It is our desire to make this journal, Ground Water Monitoring Review [ed. note: the name was changed to Ground Water Monitoring & Remediation in 1993 and then Groundwater Monitoring & Remediation in 2003; it has always had the short-form name GWMR], the receptacle of all newly developed technology and the disseminator of the state of the art skills now possessed by the few, but soon to be the arsenal of the many.” These words convey the multiple goals of (1) tracking the progress of the industry as technologies appear or evolve and publishing articles that showcase them; (2) keeping an eye on the past with insightful, thorough reviews that inform us going forward and prevent us from reinventing the wheel; and (3) educating—both practitioners and students. This was to be GWMR's “business as usual.” It was the sign of a healthy field that “business as usual” soon had to be updated. What Dr Lehr's words did not explicitly anticipate were the additional roles the journal has come to play, including (4) a source of news from the regulatory world and equipment manufacturers and, importantly, (5) a journal renowned for presenting examples of practical applications of the new and evolving technologies, including equipment, new approaches arising from revised conceptual models, and computational tools. Forty years into its run, GWMR is a journal that serves the vital role in the field of contaminant hydrogeology of marrying science with application, working where the rubber meets the road. To be sure, GWMR provides high-level research articles to its readership, but it also contributes at a level that is sometimes underestimated by the metrics-driven new world of impact factors and H-indices that inherently place the greatest emphasis on the academic side of research—also vital but not the whole story. Ironically, this is where Neil Thomson, the most recent Editor-in-Chief of GWMR, left off with his “Reflections” editorial in the last issue of 2020. For the past 9 years, Neil Thomson has been at the helm of GWMR, skillfully maintaining a balance of practical articles that inform and assist practitioners who wish to stay current and articles that address field and lab problems with levels of scientific rigor suitable for the best academic journals. He has guided GWMR through some of the darkest days of public support for groundwater research. This is quite an accomplishment on its own, but in doing so, he also managed to redefine “business as usual” in the same way as the editors before him. Think of how contaminant hydrogeology has changed since 1981. When Jay Lehr wrote the first editorial for GWMR in the early 1980s, he emphasized adapting to relatively new regulations affecting groundwater, like the Safe Drinking Water Act and RCRA, developing monitoring methods so that data collected would be valid years into the future, and the journal concerned itself with site characterization literature. In the 1990s, Mike Barcelona became the journal's Editor-in-Chief and began his tenure with commentary on volatile organic compounds in groundwater, a new and growing concern. The concept and practice of passive in situ remediation gained traction through permeable reactive barriers, bioremediation, and natural attenuation, and other innovative technologies began to hit their stride during these years. In the early 2000s, Paul Johnson brought a renewed industry perspective to the job, and a sense of humor, with informed commentary on leaking underground storage tanks, passive sampling, and encouragement for others to join him in the pursuit of career-limiting editorials, among many other contributions. During Neil Thomson's tenure, the focus of the field began to considerably shift in response to ever-increasing influence and potential for online monitoring. This still-emerging approach to groundwater monitoring makes it more attractive than ever to assess the quantitative basis for risk assessments through high-definition monitoring with remotely connected sensors and flux-based metrics. It is not hard to find Jay Lehr's original “business as usual” in all of these decades, but the adaptations and changes to the industry have been remarkable and prompt the question “what is usual?” Anticipating the answer to this question is the challenge going forward. We start 2021 positioning ourselves to meet that forward-looking challenge. GWMR has a new Editor-in-Chief, Dr J.F. (Rick) Devlin, and a new editorial board consisting of professionals from academia and industry in multiple countries. It will be our mission to continue on the trajectory left to us by Neil Thomson and draw on our collective experiences to identify and publish timely articles that tell stories from which we can all learn. Many of these will be stories of new methods, approaches, and technologies that illuminate possible futures. Some may be stories of failure, despite best practices, that shed light on aspects of the subsurface we do not yet fully understand. There will be new contaminants, new models, and new features in the journal to weave all these threads into easily digestible summaries, notes, opinion pieces, and editorials. It will be “business as usual” if you are willing to accept “usual” as a fluid concept. J.F. Devlin, Geology Department, University of Kansas, Kansas, USA Neil Thomson, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada