Mapping the knowledge structure and evolution of artificial intelligence for water reuse and sustainable water management

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a powerful instrument to solve complex problems related to sustainable water resource management because it allows creating advanced, data-driven modelling, prediction, and optimization of water systems. Although the studies in this sphere have increased quickly, the global scientific tendencies have not been thoroughly examined. This research paper presents a bibliometric review of the literature about AI applications in green water management that was published from 2015 to 2025. The Scopus database was searched with a structured search strategy on bibliographic data, and 3,280 peer-reviewed articles were analyzed. VOSviewer was used to perform bibliometric mapping and network visualization to investigate the trends in publications, most active journals, most impactful authors, contributions of institutions, country-level partnerships, and research clusters. The findings indicate that the publishing activity has grown tremendously in the last ten years, which suggests that there is a growing interest in AI-based solutions to water quality monitoring, hydrological prediction, optimization of wastewater treatment, and smart water management system. China, the United States and India became the most productive nations with the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences and Beijing normal university as some of the top contributing institutions. The analysis of the key words co-occurrence (dominant research themes) was based on machine learning, water-quality prediction, hydrological modelling, remote sensing, and decision-support systems. The co-citation analysis has shown the core studies in machine learning algorithms, including random forests, neural networks, and boosting algorithms, which underpin the present studies in this field. Overall, the results depict the growing role of AI technologies to enhance the effectiveness of water resources management and wastewater treatment. This research offers a clear insight into the intellectual framework and the future research perspective of AI-based environmentally sustainable water management which can be of great value to researchers, policymakers, and practitioners who would wish to come up with innovative and data-based water management solutions.