​Just Water Allocation in the Dulcepamba Watershed

       

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

       

 

 

 

 

 

       

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

        This is turing out to be an absolutely fabulous experience. I knew that I would love it when I made the decision to launch this project with leaders from the Dulcepamba watershed and with a local Quito NGO, but I didnt know how multifaceted it would turn out to be, and that every day would come with a (welcome) surprise and a new lesson. I have been spending more time in Quito than I expected, because there is alot of data to gather from ministries and institutes here in the capital, and because there is alot of data to analyze; both data from the ministries, and the data that we have gathered in the watershed.

       In Quito, I have been working with my colleague, David, reading territorial zoning plans of the region, analyzing precipitation, relative humidity, stream flow, and other hydrological and meteorological data of the watershed, creating GIS maps of environmental and socioeconomic characteristics of the region, and meeting with geographers, lawyers, an aquatic biologist, and others who I have found in Quito and who I have asked to advise us on different aspects of the project. The main goal of this project is to provide the social and environmental data with which equitable and Constitutional water allocation decisions can be made.  

We will: 

 

• Quantify the availability of water in the watershed

• Map the spatial distribution of crops in the watershed·      

• Quantify the crop water demands for the principal crops in the watershed at varying elevations and with varying microclimatic conditions.

• Quantify the economic value of the crops for the locals, and for the country.         

     

       In addition to these four principal activities, an aquatic ecosystem component has been added: I met an aquatic biologist here, who has offered to do a study of the biodiversity in the Dulcepamba River right above where the dam will block the river. (I will help her, as will several community members). She will do a general study of biodiversity, and a fish survey. The hydroelectric company will block the river with a big cement wall (the dam). Below the dam, the river will be dry for about 3km, before the water that the company diverts to pass through turbines returns to the river. Katie, the aquatic biologist, will contribute to our final report. 

 

​Quantifying water availability:

        Hidrotambo S.A., the hydroelectric company behind this project, has a concession to 6.50 meters cubed per second of water in the wet season, and 1.196 meters cubed per second of water in the dry season. The company found in their EIS that even during the dry season when flows in the watershed are dramatically reduced, there would be plenty of water for agriculture and industry. However, the company's EIS relies on questionable modeling techniques, and uses very little in situ data. We aim to generate a yearlong and watershed-wide set of in situ discharge measurements to inform water allocation decisionmaking.  

        We recently spent a week carrying out our first set of measurments of the volumetric flow rate of the rivers in the watershed. We were a team of 5 people, including myself, my work  partner, and three community members. These measurments will be used to estimate the total volume of surface water available in the watershed. We measured the volumetric flow rate at 10 different points in the watershed. The process of measuring flow is very long. It took us half of a day to do each measurment, because we are following USGS protocols, in which you have to divide a cross section of the target river into 25 sections, and then measure velocity at two different depths at each of the 25 points along the vertical. This means 50 measurments of velocity, in addition to measuring the distance in between each velocity measurment, and the depth of each location where velocity is measured. Although it was hard work (we started at 7am every day and finished more or less at 6pm), the watershed is so beautiful, and standing in beautiful rivers and tributaries all day is nothing to complain about!

        I really like and admire the community members we work with. One community member whose name I wont include here, is an absolutely inspiring man. He raised himself since the age of 12 due to family problems, and lived a very difficult life, going from city to city to work physically demanding jobs. Finally, he returned to the countryside where he was born, with enough money to buy property, and he began a life of farming. He married and had 2 children. Despite the obstacles in his life, he was able to make enough money to send them both to college, a rare occurence in this region of Bolivar. Now, he is a community leader, and has been organizing with his community to demand just water allocation and basic human rights for the past 9 years. He understands the grave consecuences of 72 communities losing access to water during certain parts of the year, and he works every day to protect the land, the rivers, and the people of the watershed. ​

 

Mapping the spatial distribution of crops

      Who grows what, how much of it do they grow, and where are their crops located?

        We need to know this in order to choose where to strategically locate microclimatic weather stations donated by the University of Maryland, that will estimate crop water demand for specific crops in specific microclimatic conditions. 

        We are now beginning to work on identifying the spatial distribution of crops in the watershed. We are using studies done by the Ecuadorian Ministry of Agriculture (MAGAP), aerial photography, and land use studies done by the provincial government of Bolivar, as foundations for mapping crop type and distribution. We will ¨ground-truth¨ the existing data in the watershed (verify that land uses and crop types classified in preexisting studies and through aerial imagery analysis are indeed correct) using GPS equipment. We will also meet with local growers cooperatives and an irrigation organization to ask for their collaboration in mapping crop distribution, after explaining in more detail the many facets of this project, and the benefit for local farmers. 

 

Quantifying crop water demands

        A talented team of professors and students from the University of Maryland (UMD) will work on possibly the most important part of this study, which is estimating how much water the farmers need for their crops. 

 

        The UMD team is made up of:

•  Dr. John Lea-Cox, Extension Specialist, and professor of Plant Sciences and Landscape Architecture at the University of Maryland's College of Agriculture and Natural Resources

• Bruk Belayneh, Research Assistant and Phd student, Plant Science and Landscape Architecture, University of Maryland College of Agriculture and Natural Resources

• Five University of Maryland undergraduate students with expertise in various aspects of the project including Environmental Science and Policy, Land Use, International Development and Conflict, Society and Environmental Issues, Environmental Economics, Sustainability, Civil/International Engineering, Communication, and Computer Science.

 

        The UMD team will work on the project for the next seven months, and likely in the coming years. They will use a combination of geographic information systems and crop modeling techniques, informed by real-time weather stations, to estimate crop water needs. The UMD team will arrive in Ecuador in late December, 2013, and will install the weather stations. They will spend 3 weeks in the watershed, getting to know local people, training local people on how to care for the weather stations, working on land use and crop type analyses, and distributing surveys to quantify the economic value of crops to locals ad to the country. The weather stations that the UMD team will install transfer data through the cellphone tower network every six hours to a cloud-based server. The data can be then accessed through the internet from anywhere inthe world. The UMD students, once back in Maryland, will aggregate microclimatic data sent through the cloud-based server, from January through May 2014, and using this data in combination with established crop coefficients, they will generate estimates of crop water needs using the Penmann Monteith crop water use model. This model is able predict crop water use on a daily basis using the real-time environmental (weather) data such as solar radiation, wind speed, air temperature, and relative humidity in each area of the watershed. During the spring semester (in the UMD student's Capstone class), they will integrate this crop water use data into a GIS database with precipitation data and crop acreage data so as to scale up predicted crop water needs to a watershed scale. The resulting crop models will be specific to crop type as well as location in the watershed, and will allow farmers to know quantifiably how much water they will need for irrigation at different times of the year. 

 

Estimating the economic value of agriculture for locals and for the country

       Part of the UMD team will also work on putting together data from existing agricultural surveys and administering new surveys to quantify the economic value of crops. This part of the team will focus on community needs, an economic assessment of crops (both for subsistence and profit) as well as the important aspects of building trust, communication and outreach education. They will create crop budgets that will determine local farmer’s incomes from crops that use irrigated water.

 

A Big Thank You

       I am continually amazed and immensely grateful for the outopuring of support for this project from the Fulbright Program, the Napier Initiative, the University of Maryland, from many individual donors who have supported the purchase of weather stations, from individual volunteers like Katie, the aquatic biologist, and from the communities of the Dulcepamba watershed. My family has been absolutely amazing, spreading news of the project, and providing invaluable advice. There is a plethora of positive energy behind the project, coming from many different latitudes and longitudes. THANK YOU!