Monitoring Water Quality in Impoverished Border City of Madre de Dios - Peru

This project’s goal is to promote knowledge and awareness of water quality in Madre de Dios, Perú. They hope to create well-informed citizens, capable of making informed decisions with a motivation to change their daily habits in order to protect vital resources.

Key facts:

This initiative has reached over 2,500 people and is constantly monitoring numerous river and creeks year round with active civil participation;
This initiative involves schools, universities, students, teachers, researchers and local political decision makers. In 2014, over 950 participants were actively participating in this initiative.

The problem

Peru is very vulnerable to climate change. Severe and drastic changes are already affecting the global, regional and local natural water patterns and cycles, which directly affects availability, accessibility and quality. In Peru, a transcontinental, interoceanic highway traverses a series of very distinct ecological life zones as it ascends the eastern slope of the Andes from lowland rainforest surrounding Puerto Maldonado through cloud forests to the highlands of Cusco. This area is unparalleled for its terrestrial biodiversity. Although the highway improvement was well-planned and engineered, plans to prevent the possible degradation of terrestrial and aquatic resources in the region due to increased human activities have been minimal.

The solution

This project uses both education and scientific research, a hands on inclusive approach and local and cultural sensitivity to address the issues of water availability and quality in a climate change context. It has elected 37 study sites located between Cusco and Puerto Maldonado, with all sites located within a corridor of two kilometers on either side of the Interoceanic Highway. These sites range over 4,000 meters in elevation and provide an unparalleled opportunity to assess water quality impacts.

The project uses “Leaf Packs” which consists of filling coarse mesh, “onion bags” with leaves collected either from trees or the forest floor adjacent to streams. The artificial leaf packs are then placed in a stream and secured. They are then left in the stream for several weeks to allow colonization by aquatic macro invertebrates (mostly insects). The bag is then retrieved and the benthic macroinvertebrates are removed, identified (either to family or order level), and counted. A water quality estimate can then be calculated based on various combinations of the basic data: the number of each family or order of macroinvertebrate found in the sample and knowledge about the pollution tolerance value assigned to those taxa.

Helping the planet

This activity aims to refine and calibrate an aquatic environmental education program called “Leaf Pack” and expand its utility to include volunteer, citizen based monitoring of water quality of streams and rivers. All of this is intended to inform efforts directed toward conservation, mitigation, and/or adaptation and improve local and regional decision making regarding natural resources.

Helping people

To empower local villagers, results have already been integrated into existing conservation programs that are aimed at rural and urban school children, teachers, and adult villagers in Amazonia. These conservation programs provide training for teachers and learning materials for students focused on conservation, with particular emphasis on local problem solving.

Scaling Up

The general public can be trained to sample and identify macroinvertebrates. Leaf packs are one method of sampling macroinvertebrates that have the benefit of being inexpensive and easily implemented on a large scale.