Restoring the Ecosystem in Senegal

By: Jeremy Dawson

 

There has been an issue with the Water in Senegal for years now due to an increase in the salinity of the water.

 

Dr. Brice Loose, an Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island, has taken a keen interest in helping solve this problem.

 

Loose said that he is trying to support a movement that is “trying to bring back an ecosystem on the brink of some pretty serious habitat destruction.”

 

Simone who is the president of the women's association of the Gandon Community Nature Reserve, according to the United Nations Development Programme, said, "We used to drink water from the river, and our children - and ourselves - would fall sick so very often...  We didn't know that this was all due to the fact that our waters were being polluted, and that the plants which used to filter the dirt were disappearing"

 

It has been said that a large contributing factor has been the decline in the amount of trees in the area, called mangroves.

 

Loose says, “The thing that is amazing about mangroves is that they sort of create their own weather to a certain degree. They create their own microclimate and that’s because they are able to essentially occupy regions at a broad range of salinity from essentially very fresh to very salty.”

 

The mangroves will extract the salt from the water then release it back into the air. Loose describes mangroves as being like a “desalinator that can actually lower the salinity in a region.”

 

This issue is being addressed by replanting as much as possible. It is a long process because of how many acres of mangroves were destroyed.

 

Although the process is long, it is effective. According to Fox News, since 2006 and as of 2013, reforestation had revived 30,000 acres of mangrove in Senegal.

 

Fox News writes, “In the nearby village of Diakene Ouolof, resident Mariama Tine said ‘everything was dead’ before the replanting programme began.

 

‘The mangroves stopped the advance of salt and we were able to recover rice fields. There were no fish here before but we are starting to get a lot of them, along with oysters and ark clams,’ she said.”

 

Loose explains that with these changes, “It’s going to provide a more stable food supply to the local population.”