4 Stellies students are on a mission to solve South Africa’s water crisis

Four Masters students from Stellenbosch University are spear heading a country wide initiative to assess the quantity and quality of ground water reserves.

The “Know Your Water” team are a group of postgraduate students at Stellenbosch University. The project is the brainchild of Jared van Rooyen and forms the basis of his MSc.

Yaa Agyare-Dwomah and Zita Harilall are working on their honours theses and will work on the precipitation model that feeds into Jared’s groundwater model.

The project is supervised by Dr. Jodie Miller who works on the application of isotopes to solving water problems.

The purpose of the campaign is to accumulate the funds necessary to collect as many rainfall and groundwater samples across the country as possible. The aim is to develop a model that determines distribution of renewable groundwater resources in South Africa.

Renewable groundwater reserves are those that have been recharged by rainfall in the last 50 years.

Climate change will directly impact the amount of recharge and hence the model will also be able to predict vulnerability to climate change. It will be developed by the combined efforts of Stellenbosch University students as well as the public as a citizen science initiative.

“As drought grips large parts of South Africa, the importance of groundwater as a secure source of water for domestic and agricultural needs has become clear.”

“However, whilst many people think of groundwater as an unlimited resource, groundwater does have a finite limit and needs to be managed sustainably to ensure future supply. Help contribute to a nationwide citizen science project to predict our groundwater’s sustainability by determining how much of our groundwater is dependent on rainfall.”

This sampling will begin at the end of this funding campaign on the 19th of March 2017 and the entire project will help predict the sustainability of South Africa’s Groundwater.