A baseline assessment of water quality in the Gambia River and the potential for community-based monitoring in the Gambia, West Africa

Abstract

As human populations continue to grow and land uses expand, the capacity to negatively impact our surface waters and watersheds throughout the world through contamination and human disturbances likewise increases. This potential for adverse effects on our world‟s water often results in reduced water quality. It is for this reason that water quality monitoring has become an important aspect of environmental science over the past several decades and is continuing to be an issue of community concern. Throughout the country of The Gambia, there is little information regarding the status of the countries groundwater and surface water quality. In an attempt to fill this information gap, this thesis undertook a baseline study of water quality on The Gambia River pertaining to human and ecosystem health. Furthermore, this thesis evaluated the capacity for community-based monitoring in The Gambia as a means of establishing whether local community members can engage themselves as citizen scientists, to determine if they can collect credible data.