Guiana Plateau – Spatial hydrology for water management with Bio-Plateaux II

The Bio-Plateaux II project is a cross-border regional cooperation initiative involving French Guiana, Suriname and the state of Amapá in Brazil.

Co-funded by the European Union (under the Interreg Amazonia Cooperation Programme), the Territorial Collectivity of French Guiana(CTG), the French Guiana Water Authority (OEG), the National Centre for Space Studies (CNES), the French Office for Biodiversity (OFB) and the Directorate-General for Territories and the Sea(DGTM), and coordinated by the International Office for Water (OiEau), this project pursues several strategic objectives:

• Integrated Water Resources Management(IWRM), to develop a concerted and shared approach across the Maroni and Oyapock transboundary river basins.
• facilitating stakeholder networks to establish an ongoing technical dialogue and promote the sharing of experiences between institutions, scientists and territorial managers on both sides of the borders.
• strengthening knowledge to address the practical needs of local areas in the face of environmental challenges, such as the quality of aquatic environments and the impacts of climate change.
• moving towards sustainable governance by using scientific knowledge as a lever to shape and establish sustainable cross-border governance bodies.

In French Guiana, Suriname and Brazil, the Maroni and Oyapock river basins cover vast areas that are sometimes difficult to access and poorly monitored. Spatial hydrology enables these environments to be monitored from space, complementing ground-based measuring stations, to improve understanding, monitoring and the integrated management of water resources on a cross-border scale.

The ‘Spatial Hydrology’ component of Bio-Plateaux II represents a unique global innovation through the integration of four complementary research areas (see below), carried out in collaboration with the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development(IRD) and the start-up Hydromatters.

The results of this work are fully integrated and can be viewed on the online platform www.bio-plateaux.org.

Developed by OiEau, the interface provides maps of cumulative rainfall, dashboards showing MGB model outputs with alert thresholds, altimetric monitoring points and turbidity monitoring data that can be used directly by managers.

The official handover ceremony held in Kourou and Cayenne, attended by a high-level delegation from Suriname, laid the foundations for direct applications in the Maroni basin:

• Monitoring of mining pollution and public health: in the face of the worrying deterioration in water quality due to the rise in illegal gold panning, spatial monitoring of turbidity provides a valuable indicator for protecting the health of the river’s inhabitants.
• Paving the way for a permanent river basin organisation: the scientific findings have reignited the political momentum towards the creation of a Franco-Surinamese European Grouping of Territorial Cooperation (EGTC).
• Navigability planning: flow simulations from the MGB model are used to anticipate the impacts of severe droughts in order to assess the river’s navigability during low-water periods, a vital issue for the transport of goods and people.
• Synergy with national rainfall data: Bio-Plateaux’s work ties in with Suriname’s national strategy to strengthen rainfall monitoring by incorporating analysis of mobile phone networks (RainCell).

The cross-border workshop held in Oiapoque highlighted the widespread adoption of spatial hydrology tools and their outputs by the authorities in the state of Amapá (Brazil) and Guyanese managers:

• The Brazilian Civil Defence in Amapá now uses the data and simulations for effective monitoring and the anticipation of extreme floods.
• The Amapá Public Research Institute (IEPA) uses modelling to produce 2D hydraulic maps of flood-prone areas and analyse the long-term impact of climate change.
• Satellite indicators feed into the water quality monitoring programme Qualiagua run by the Amapá Environment Secretariat (SEMA), and into the environmental quality monitoring programme of the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (ICMBio), which uses water colour monitoring to preserve the environmental balance and marine and river biodiversity.
• The French Guiana Water Authority (OEG) and the Amapá State Secretariat for International Relations (SECRICOMEX) are collaborating to develop a shared assessment, based on a common hydrographic reference framework, which serves as the essential technical foundation for the future Joint Commission for the Cooperative Management of the Oiapock River (CMRO).

This mission provided an opportunity to present these innovative tools, their applications, and the results available online via the bio-plateaux.org platform to partners in the three regions.