Please support Environmental Research in the Tropical Rainforest of Mexico

Dear funders, supporters and readers,

I am a Senior student of Biochemical engineering doing research in the Tropical Rainforest of Veracruz, Mexico. The research is taking place in the mountainous rural communities near the coast. I am convinced that as a professional in development we must generate knowledge and contribute with sustainable development of rural communities.

I want to invite you all, please keep reading about and support this noble project.

This is a non-profit project aimed to collect technical and scientific information available to understand and determine the current water quality withdrawal for human consumption, and as well the future availability in the mountainous rural communities of the study area. The area is so important because its rocky morphology, product of early volcanic activity with fragile soils is sustaining tropical rainforest.

The project needs funds to buy new and more capable specific field equipment that helps us monitoring efficiently new different variables, in-situ and remotely (e.g. a complete weather station, time lapse camera, infrared camera, high resolution camera, portable photometer, high accuracy gps, soil moisture meter). The basic field equipment that I am using at the moment needs to be updated. The project also requires to hire a light aircraft for low altitude high resolution aerial photographing and recognizing of the whole forested area. These images are going to be very helpful for analysing and contrasting three-dimensional high resolution digital elevation models.

The water quality and availability have been severely damaged in the coastal area due to the deforestation of the zone as a product of the human activities in the past decades. As a rural area there is no access to infrastructure or technology that helps to improve the water quality. So most of the communities can just only rely on springs located away and uphill several feet above the level of the sea and few of them rely on streams.

We are sampling the the water sources of the area and we need to determine the major cause of the variation of some crucial parameters, find solutions and alternatives to each particular case in order to ensure the long term water quality and availability.

Funding is crucial for this project because hiring a light aircraft is a major key feature for this project, but is so expensive here (around 2,400 USD/hour) even though that I am working harder in my free time to rise some money, I could not afford the amount of money required to finish this research in a short time. Since I am living in Mexico it will take me up to 4 years to reunite all this money. But believe in me, I am doing my best. With the money I have got during my free time job I bough a Chinese cheaper motorcycle to move around the area and portable meters. The project, due to its importance and transcendence has got recently a satellite imagery grant from a foreign foundation with an estimated worth of 5,000 USD.

No matter how little is the amount of your contribution, I am sure that it will make a huge difference, because that is going to help us to finish this research and provide with the most complete, accurate and useful information to all those people living in the rural area, in a way that they can easily understand about their water sources, aquifers and how the soil, underground conditions, geological area, climate, precipitation and the lost of forested areas have, and will have major influence over the amount of water available. And what they can do to manage effectively their water resources, contributing to preserve their health and also enhance the water quality on a sustainable way.

Thank you very much for taking the time to read about this project. Also thank you very much for supporting and funding.

Sincerely,

Miguel A. Trinidad