Tackling water quality through grassroots collaboration

The conservation and sustainable use of global marine resources is so fundamentally important that it’s the focus of one of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals opens in new tab/window. But what exactly inspires scientists to devote their work to the underwater world?

For Dr Antonella Rivera opens in new tab/window, a marine biology researcher in Honduras, it was a trip to the Bay Islands north of the Honduran mainland. For her bachelor’s degree, she was doing volunteer work and training throughout a marine park there.

Antonella went on to get a scholarship that allowed her to pursue a master’s degree in Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at the University of Oviedo opens in new tab/window in Spain followed by a PhD in Social Ecology. From there, she started focusing exclusively on marine-based research and projects.

Spotlight on sewage

For the last eight years, Antonella has been back in Honduras working for the Coral Reef Alliance opens in new tab/window as Principal Investigator.

Her love of the marine world may have been inspired by the beauty of the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef system, but a much less attractive ocean feature has become the focus of her investigations — sewage:

I started noticing how important sewage treatment and water quality is here in the Caribbean. It might not be such a flashy concern if you’re not seeing it happen. But what if we can consistently show that if sewage isn't treated properly before it goes into the ocean, it not only affects human health but it also affects the reef? Sewage can make the reef more susceptible to bleaching and more likely to have diseases.

Antonella collaborated on a white paper looking at integrated watershed management, examining exactly what pollutants are travelling into the watershed and marine environment. This project highlighted issues in the approach to sewage treatment across Honduras:

We have sewage treatment, but across the whole mainland, including close to the capital, many people have septic tanks. There are not clear regulations around how these are built and maintained, which can lead to improperly treated sewage leaking off.

The Coral Reef Alliance in collaboration with the Bay Islands Conservation Association opens in new tab/window had been working with a local water board to properly manage and update a sewage treatment plant on Half Moon Bay, Roatan, the largest of the Bay Islands of Honduras, for several years. Antonella started intensively studying the results of this work to see what impact it had for the community and local reef. The results were very encouraging. She explains:

The changes that took place in Half Moon Bay were really from the bottom up. It was very grassroots, with the local community getting together and then joining up with the government. I saw they had been able to treat some 30 million gallons of sewage and had a very satisfied community. And the reef was doing so much better. There were about three orders of magnitude less of pathogens.

The power of collaboration

In reflecting on the success of the water board and sewage treatment plant in Roatan, Antonella notes it was not the infrastructure alone driving it, but rather having comprehensive management including training and funds:

A practical challenge for this is getting the necessary funding in place. Antonella explains:

Getting funding for infrastructure or something tangible is one thing. But to find a funder who’s open to the money being used for salaries, or to monitor and evaluate if something is working is hard. We are fortunate that we now have this great case study to show how this can work.

Creating comparable data

Armed with data and learnings from a successful case study, Antonella believes the next logical step is to scale it up. The ambition is to share learnings across the whole Mesoamerican Barrier Reef region. To this end, she and her team have been developing a monitoring protocol opens in new tab/window so Mexico, Belize and Honduras can collect and monitor comparable data. This has been a lengthy project, Antonella explains:

With water quality, you have such a huge array of parameters. Sometimes you can't translate one unit to another. Lab methods also vary among countries, and some have more technical capacity than others. We worked hard to ensure all measurements were unified. It took almost a year just to get the protocol out, and we worked with over 20 partners to check and revise the protocol.

Now it is ready, we want to make sure everybody has access to it and that it's completely free and open. We're here to answer their questions and make sure they will take the data. This way, this project will live on when we're no longer here.

Overcoming gender barriers

Antonella has achieved high levels of academic success and found a scientific role she is passionate about within her native country. But she says none of this was without challenge, given a lack of local emphasis on scientific research:

When I was younger, I didn't have a scientific path in my head. I just knew I loved the environment and wanted to be close to it, which is why I initially picked biology. It was only when I went to Spain to study for my master’s that a whole new world opened up with the opportunity to do applied research.

This created a dilemma for her, considering future opportunities, she recalls:

It was the prompting of some encouraging mentors that kept Antonella on a research path in Spain:

They said to me, if you don’t do what you love right now when you’re young, when will you do it? So, I started on my research path with my PhD and then did post-doctoral research in South America.

Antonella knew she ultimately wanted to return to Honduras and that this would lead to some hard choices:

There were so few opportunities in academia in Honduras, which is why the first role I took when I returned was in management. I felt like a scientific research path wasn’t open to me because opportunities in my country are limited, and funding is scarce.

Fortunately, the organization Antonella works with was open to her bringing her research skillset to the table. In a fairly short time, she was able to transition to Principal Investigator:

Now I’m doing what I’m passionate about. But I do feel like I've had to make my own path. It's not been as simple as if I’d lived somewhere where you can get an associate professor role in a university following your PhD and postdoc. That's not something we have here. But, when you really do love something, have people that trust in you, have great mentors and a support team, you're able to build that bridge.

An ongoing focus on water quality

Looking to the future, Antonella believes water quality will continue to be a top priority across the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef system. To ensure more people can benefit from her findings, she wants to make sure they are shared with the public and those on the ground who need them. She also wants to see these findings shared on a much wider scale:

Now we have a snapshot of what the situation is in the Mesoamerican reef, we can start targeting solutions, making them locally tailored to those specific sites.

I think my overall goal is to bring science to the developing world, making sure everybody has access to the data. There are so many amazing organizations I've had the privilege to meet, including lots of smaller, local NGOs. They're doing an amazing job but don’t have the time or resources to have someone in-house doing the necessary research. I want to help get the information to them so they can share it with the public in a way that's accessible. I feel very passionate about finding a way to do that.