The Meta river basin supplies water to the crops, people and wildlife of the vast Colombian savannah known as the Orinoquia or "Llanos Orientales", but given the current lack of data, it is difficult to know how much water is in the system and even more difficult to predict future flows in a changing climate.
Colombian researchers (including from the Universidad del Valle), together with international collaborators, have taken the first step towards a tool that could help decision-makers maintain a better balance between agricultural production, wild areas and drinking water in populated areas.
According to the World Bank, the Orinoco departments (Meta, Casanare, Arauca, Vichada) generate 7% of the country's GDP (through rice, palm oil, livestock and other primary production), but the region loses 200,000 hectares of natural ecosystems every year.
Jeison Mesa Diez, a Master's student in Statistics from the School of Statistics at Univalle's Faculty of Engineering, explained that the researchers used a mathematical model, satellite information, and data from the Institute of Hydrology, Meteorology and Environmental Studies (IDEAM) to calculate the Annual Water Yield of the Meta river basin.
"We were able to understand which mathematical model adapts to the basin's own conditions with the available information; this will allow us to make future forecasts of climate change impacts on the basin," Mesa said.
The Research
Colombia's Meta river stretches for more than 1,000 kilometres and its basin covers some 110,000 square kilometres.
Mesa noted that the Meta river basin was chosen because of its water importance for the country's agricultural future and better data availability than other regions of Colombia. .
In the article "Assessing the Effectiveness of the Use of the InVEST Annual Water Yield Model for the Rivers of Colombia: A Case Study of the Meta River Basin", published in the scientific journal Water, the researchers were the first to use the InVEST-AWY model on a large scale in the territory of Colombia, allowing to evaluate its effectiveness in hydrological modelling for water management.
Mesa, who is one of the authors of the study, explained that the main objective is to assess the feasibility of using the InVEST-AWY model in the Meta river basin and sub-basins, a model with low data robustness that allows good results to be obtained at a spatial scale in terms of water availability.
"If we can get good data, we can make a good model and then we can use those models to make better decisions," Mesa said.
Dr Jeimar Tapasco, Principal Scientist at The Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT and lead author of the paper explained that although the Orinoco region has been seen as a potential agro-industrial development pole by the Colombian government, there is great concern about the development models to be implemented and their impact on the environment.
"This is a region with a very important flooded savannah ecosystem in the departments of Casanare and Arauca, whose dynamics are determined by the Meta river and its tributaries," said Tapasco.
Tapasco said that using better models to represent the water behaviour of this river will help to understand the effects of changes in land use, water use and the potential effects of climate change.
"In this way, decision-makers will have better information on the evaluation of the impacts of different instruments in the formulation of public policy," said Tapasco.
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Read more from Univalle’s School of Statistics: Statistical analysis of Bogota's wind could reveal clues to global climate |
International Collaborators
The model used to estimate water yield in the project is called the Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST) and was developed in 2007 by Stanford University, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and The Nature Conservancy (TCN).
"Although it was developed for rivers in the United States, it was adapted to Colombian conditions," Mesa said.
The model was not the only facet of the project that benefited from international collaborations: the team benefited from the expertise of Brayan Valencia Garcia, the first author of the paper and a third-semester student in the Master's program in Hydrometeorology at Kazan Federal University in Russia, who said that academics in Russia have a lot of experience in point-zone hydrological modeling (e.g., station-based analysis) and in the field of time series.
"Another important advantage was the commitment and real interest of the research advisors (Professors Gusarov and Guryanov) who were very supportive in terms of the research approach and optimization of the Python code to run the model," Valencia said.
Valencia and Mesa expressed that in the future, they hope to be able to use this model for other regions in Colombia and Russia.
"We are currently working on the collection of climate information, soils, land cover and data required to reuse InVEST-AWY in seven watersheds of the lower Volga River (in Russia)," Valencia said.
If you are interested in contacting the researcher or learning more about the project, please write to the Communications Office, Faculty of Engineering: comunicaingenieria(at)correounivalle.edu.co.
Cover photo: Jeison Mesa Diez, a student completing his Master's degree in Statistics Credit: Alexander Bejarano/NCC-FI/Univalle
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