Our research
Agua Salud and its use-inspired and applied research provide a unique setting for researchers interested in studying ecosystem services and landscape restoration.
Working across disciplines and in collaboration with decision makers, researchers can develop new ideas and studies that build on one another and inform land management. We aim to harness ecosystem resilience and economic potential to help devise innovative nature-based solutions to the increasing challenges brought by land use and environmental change in the tropics.
Research Areas
The project is transforming what we know about the impacts of reforestation and land-use practices on water resource systems, carbon uptake and other key environmental processes.
The Agua Salud research consists of three intersecting pillars:
Hydrological research
Secondary forest dynamics
Integration
Plantations and other planted lands
Hydrological research
Access to high-quality water is one of the biggest challenges that we already face in the 21st century. Tropical forests play an important role in maintaining water quality by filtering it and regulating its flow in the watershed through the sponge effect. Understanding these processes is critical to improving land management.
The Agua Salud research tests the sponge effect in forests, studying the degree to which it helps improve and preserve water resources, and how restoring degraded land through reforestation can improve soil hydrological properties.
Secondary forest dynamics
Understanding secondary forest dynamics and ecosystem processes is essential to ensuring the services these forests provide, such as carbon sequestration, groundwater recharge, the restoration of essential soil microbiomes, and protection of animal biodiversity.
Agua Salud researchers have shown the effectiveness of secondary forests at capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and the rapid rate at which these forests can increase groundwater recharge, results of local and potentially global significance.
Planted lands for restoration and other purposes
Changes in land management that include planting trees must also have a positive impact for landowners and communities for changes to be adopted. Agua Salud research has shown that Smart Reforestation can unlock the economic potential of lands, even on infertile soils. Researchers are further engaging landowners and stakeholders to better understand their needs and seek research collaboration.
Commitment to
long-term research
Long-term and complex challenges require long-term perspectives and solutions. Agua Salud’s long-term experiments and robust data supply invaluable insights and knowledge necessary to understand and sustain ecosystem services, improve land use and reforestation efforts, and build predictive models necessary for science and planning, to ensure sustainability in the face of environmental change.
The landscape scale sampling and high frequency measurements of the Secondary Forest Dynamics network (SFD) boasts some 1.5 million individual measurements. Accurate measurements every 5 minutes across streams in eight different land uses in the hydrological network includes 10s of millions of data points. Our core plantation experiment includes 25,000 trees measured annually. These intersecting networks measurements allow researchers to capture the effects of catastrophic weather-related events, such as droughts or super storms, on ecosystem processes and services, and provide an unparalleled view into a future warmer world.
Do Research at Agua Salud
Agua Salud’s multi-, inter- and trans-disciplinary research helps us better understand the impact of ecosystem services from different perspectives.
scientific literature
Research throughout the past 17 years has produced many key findings and publications. This is only a selection of publications that encapsulate the broad scope of the research done at Agua Salud.
Resources
Agua Salud, with the aid of internal and external collaborations and partnerships, continues to produce crucial data and resources, which can be used for parallel projects and efforts in ecosystem restoration and predictive models.
Other Initiatives
Forest Restoration in the Ngäbe-Buglé Comarca
Agua Salud research illustrates tradeoffs in ecosystem services with land management strategies and shows positive benefits associated with reforestation. We are leveraging this knowledge as part of a transdisciplinary initiative in the Ngäbe-Buglé comarca, in western Panama, to seek scalable solutions that benefit the people of their communities. We collaborated with the traditional comarca leadership to establish restoration plots, to help test tree species, advance ecological and hydrological research, and help us better understand the socio-ecological systems within which reforestation takes place. Local knowledge and community engagement is critical to long-term success and sustainability.
Education and Outreach
People are the biggest agents of change. The Agua Salud team recently partnered with the Biocultural Learning Center to establish a citizen science and education program with the school in neighboring community El Jiral. Teaching children important lessons on simple field monitoring and tracking stream health to understand how ecosystem services work, this and future programs are designed to easily be included into the national education curriculum of the Panamanian school system.
