Developing a monitoring plan for the Thachin River, Thailand

In affiliation with a US-AID project lead by Dave Nemazie at Center Administration, Bill Dennison and Tim Carruthers from the Integration and Application Network (IAN) and Ben Longstaff from Ecocheck (NOAA-UMCES Partnership), and PhD student Monika Shaffner from the University of Berne (Switzerland) attended a series of meetings on the Thachin River, Thailand. These meetings culminated in a one day workshop with 80 local Thai participants, where all IAN staff gave presentations. The project was working with local management and volunteer agencies to come up with recommendations for further development of a monitoring plan for this seriously degraded river. There is a decade of dispersed monitoring data and the issues and concerns in the catchments are well established, so conceptual diagrams were employed to help synthesize the current state of knowledge and key management goals. The main recommendation was that better communication of the current state of knowledge can assist to engage the general public and politicians in implementing required actions such as building and utilizing sewage treatment plants.

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