Agua Salud Project

An Integrated Ecosystem Services Project 

Overview

The Agua Salud Project is a collaboration between the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, the Panama Canal Authority, Panama’s National Environmental Authority, and the HSBC Climate Partnership that seeks to understand and quantify the diverse set of ecological, social, and economic services provided by tropical forests in the Panama Canal Watershed. The project utilizes the Panama Canal’s central role in world commerce to focus global attention on ecosystem services provided by tropical forests. Carbon storage, clean and plentiful water, and biodiversity conservation for enhanced ecosystem function and ecotourism are just a few of the services provided by tropical forests.

At the most basic level, the Auga Salud Project will quantify the effect of different land uses on (1) water quality, quantity, and temporal distribution; (2) carbon storage; and (3) biodiversity values. It will do this within focal research catchments in the Agua Salud and adjacent watersheds. These focal catchments serve as a research platform that will permit process-level studies to be linked with ecosystem dynamics and function.

Across a land-use gradient, we aim to describe the interplay between terrestrial vegetation, water movement, and carbon dynamics at both local and regional scales. Furthermore, we seek to understand how land use affects the distribution and dynamics of local flora and fauna. The Agua Salud research platform includes protected mature forests as well as a variety of other land uses typical of rural Panama. The 20-year project horizon affords both spatial and temporal comparisons that will allow for better understanding of ecosystem services associated with forests in an era of global climate change.

Experiments at the scale of entire catchments will permit complete inventories of water and carbon, as well as their fluctuations, in forested, deforested, and regrowing landscapes. In addition, we intend to expand the project to address the social and economic values of these forests. Ultimately, the Agua Salud Project will yield valuable information to help inform sustainable land-use management decisions in the Panama Canal Watershed and around the world.

Catchments : Land use

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