CASSARINA

ChAnge, Stress and Sustainability : Aquatic ecosystem, Resilence In North Africa

coordinator : Dr Roger flower

CASSARINA is a new EU funded initiative to implement a co-ordinated quality controlled assessment of recent environmental change in North African wetland lakes. In this highly sensitive region, water resources are being rapidly degraded and diminished by habitat destruction through land-use changes. Additionally, predicted global warming effects are very likely to exacerbate the present problems. CASSARINA is designed to enable scientists from Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, UK and Norway to co-operate in a substantial research programme targeted on the remaining North African wetland lake ecosystems. The main aim of the project is to assess the status, past and present, of important aquatic ecosystems along an international transect of sites selected from each of the three North African countries. The strategy for achieving this aim is divisible into parts that constitute the major aims of the project and are:

• Impact assessment of land-use practices on shallow lake ecosystems systems in intensively farmed or otherwise developed regions in each North African country since ca 1900.
• The recognition of pre-disturbance communities and of current base-line ecological for diatoms, aquatic plants, and zooplankton. and water quality conditions.
• The regional implementation of modern hydrobiological and water quality survey with centrally imposed analytical quality control.
• The establishment of complementarity in scientific method by setting internationally co-ordinated procedures for current (this project) and future monitoring.
• The establishment of a North African scientific infrastructure for aquatic environments and provision of a quality controlled base-line ecological data base to enable effective assessment of future conservation action or other environmental changes.
• To facilitate future international collaboration and introduce palaeolimnology as an inexpensive tool for monitoring recent environmental change in North African wetland lakes.

contact :

Dr Roger FLOWER
Environmental Change Reseach Center
UCL
26 Bedford Way, London WC1H OAP
United Kingdom
rflower@geog.ucl.ac.uk

Web site :