Many regions in across the world depend on drinking water from karst aquifers. Karstic groundwater recharge is the most important process limiting the volumes of sustainable usage of karst water resources. Consequently, adapted approaches have been developed to better quantify and predict present and future karstic groundwater recharge. Recent applications of these approaches have also proven to explain dynamics of speleothem d¹⁸O records that have been considered white noise. The first part of this presentation will introduce karst hydrology and recent karst recharge modelling approaches.

The second part will show recent findings in applying these approaches for interpreting speleothem d¹⁸O records and end with an outlook for more advanced applications of karst recharge models in speleothem science.