Project Name: Bergisches Land

Country: Germany

Project Manager: Claudia Haltern

Area Social Media: Facebook Page

The region Bergisches Land is located in southern part of North-Rhine-Westfalia in Germany. Geologically it belongs to the Rhenish Slate Mountains. Its western border is the river Rhine and on the east side it merges into the so called Sauerland, one of the Central German Uplands. The major part of the area is characterized by a low mountain landscape rich in variety with forests, meadows, hills and V-shaped river valleys. Many of the rivers are dammed up to artificial lakes, which serve either as reservoirs for drinking water or industrial water, or as recreational areas. There are more than 20 artificial lakes in this small region, which is unique in the world. Some of the recreational lakes serve as popular dive sites, but conditions vary widely throughout the year. As the lakes are fed and drained by rivers, which carry or swirl up sediments, conditions seem to depend on weather conditions, flow rates and the water level among other factors. All these may as well influence the overall water quality and biodiversity. In order to monitor these factors our volunteer team will regularly collect corresponding data. As a first step we will focus on water temperature, visibility, water level and easily accessible chemical data as pH-value and nitrate. Furthermore, according to our suggestion that weather conditions may have an influence on current water status, we will list meteorological data as the average air temperature, total precipitation and sunshine hours on a monthly base. We plan to measure more demanding parameters as saprobic index and algae growth in the future as resources hopefully grow. Basically the Project is not limited to a defined number of sites, but as resources are limited we will start with one site, which is the so called Wuppertalsperre.

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