Abstract
Monitoring of cyanobacteria in freshwater ecosystems is a complex task, which is time consuming and expensive due to the chaotic population dynamics and highly heterogeneous distribution of cyanobacteria populations in water bodies. The financial cost constitutes a strong limitation for the implementation of long-term monitoring programs in developing countries, particularly in Africa. The work presented here was performed in the framework of an international project addressing the sustainable monitoring and management of surface water resources used for the production of drinking water in three African countries. We tested the potential of a citizen approach for monitoring cyanobacterial blooms, which are a growing threat to the drinking water supply. This pilot study was designed, implemented and evaluated in close interaction with the Pasteur Institute of the Ivory Coast and with the populations of three villages located on the shoreline of a freshwater lagoon located near Abidjan city. Based on the use of a smartphone application, the citizens of the three villages were invited to report water color changes, as these changes could reflect cyanobacteria proliferations. A two-year experimentation period has shown that it is possible to mobilize the local populations to monitor cyanobacterial blooms. The data collected by citizens were consistent with the data obtained by a classical monitoring of cyanobacteria performed over seven months, but it appeared that new approaches were needed to validate the citizen data. This participatory approach also provided great improvements to the understanding and awareness of local populations regarding water quality and cyanobacterial bloom issues. Finally, we discuss some of the difficulties and limitations of our participatory monitoring approach that should be considered by further implementations. Despite these difficulties, our work suggests that citizen monitoring is a promising approach that may complement the classical approach to sustainable monitoring of cyanobacteria in developing countries.
Highlights
Monitoring the proliferations of potentially toxic cyanobacteria in freshwater ecosystems is an essential pillar for the assessment and management of environmental and sanitary risks associated with these phenomena
The participation of nonscientists in environmental monitoring is not a recent practice, the phenomenon has undergone spectacular development over the last twenty years, facilitated by new communication technologies and mobile computing applications. This first citizen project based on the use of a smartphone application for the monitoring of cyanobacterial blooms in Africa shows that there is an opportunity for such approaches for both (i) the improvement of the monitoring of cyanobacteria in addition to the monitoring performed by relevant institutions and (ii) the improvement of the awareness and social learnings for the local communities concerning the health risks associated with cyanobacteria and more globally about the degradation of the water quality
Concerning the improvement of institutional monitoring, as mentioned in the introduction, it is well known that accurate monitoring of cyanobacterial blooms is very costly
Summary
Monitoring the proliferations of potentially toxic cyanobacteria in freshwater ecosystems is an essential pillar for the assessment and management of environmental and sanitary risks associated with these phenomena. It has been shown that (i) one of the main difficulties in cyanobacteria monitoring is due to the temporal and spatial variability in their vertical and horizontal distributions in water bodies [e.g. 1–3], meaning that the choice of sampling strategy and the tools used for sampling have great impacts on the quality of the data collected [3, 4], and (ii) accurate monitoring of cyanobacteria and their associated risks is time consuming and expensive [5]. The use of remote sensing [8] and LIDAR [9] allows to estimate the horizontal and/or vertical distribution of the cyanobacterial biomass in a lake. Some of these tools remain under development but are increasingly used for cyanobacteria monitoring, in developed countries. The cost of these devices is still a strong limitation to their use in developing countries [10]
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