Rios de Vida: High School Students Assess Mountain Rivers as Citizen Scientists Dear
Rios de Vida: High School Students Assess Mountain Rivers as Citizen Scientists Dear AGU, Mountains are vital sources of freshwater (water towers) around the world. Mountains, covering ~27% of the Earth’s surface provide >50% of the world’s freshwater resources – a contribution that is even more critical in dry regions such as the Mediterranean. Other than providing water to downstream villages, towns and cities, mountain streams and rivers also sustain numerous fragile ecosystems such as forests and wetlands along whole extent of their watersheds. However, both the quantity and quality of mountain rivers and the ecosystem services they provide, are increasingly threatened by human intervention, pollution, and climate change. Rios de Vida (Rivers of Life) is a wide hands-on environmental science education program, founded by the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT), linking rivers and local schools with their regional university partners (website: https://ecologia.ugr.es/pages/riosvida). Here we are with a group of grade students from the Albaycín high school in Río Genil at an elevation of ~1100 m above mean sea level in the Sierra Nevada mountains of southern Spain in early February 2022 (left photo). With their science teachers assisting, dedicated instructors guide the students in hands-on stream sampling for biological, physical/chemical and geomorphological information, sample analyses and data interpretation. The same class of students will return to the same stretch of the river in the spring to make a similar assessment of river health between seasons. Similarly, groups of students from three more schools will be evaluating the Río Genil’s status as it meanders its way down the valley, picking up flows from other tributaries, runs through the city of Granada (population ~350,000), and on to the rich agricultural plains (vegas) below – chronicling human-induced changes in the river’s ecology and health (right photo). All collected data will be shared openly among the participating schools, who will meet to jointly discuss the findings with University mentors before the schools break for the summer. Participation of students as citizen scientists will not only advance regional watershed science consequential to their own lives, but also lead to wider community engagement and implementation of sustainable freshwater management policies. Mani Villar-Argaiz, Pablo Jáimez-Cuéllar, Eulogio Corral, Manolo Tierno de Figueroa, Manu López-Rodríguez, Pilar Fernández, Antonio Jiménez, Antonio Quesada, Pepe Barea, Flora Pérez, Juanma Medina-Sánchez and Bopi Biddanda Departamentos de Ecología y de Zoología, Instituto del Agua, Universidad de Granada, Spain Observatorio de Cambio Global Sierra Nevada Biotecnología y Medioambiente SL IES Albaycín, IES Zaidín-Vergeles, IES Mariana Pineda, IES Fuente Vaqueros Annis Water Resources Institute, Grand Valley State University, Michigan, USA (http://ecologia.ugr.es/, https://zoologia.ugr.es, https://obsnev.es, http://www.institutodelagua.es, and https://www.gvsu.edu/wri/) -- source link