The Hydrology and Freshwater Observatory addresses one of the most critical but understudied components of the Congo Basin system: the hydrological cycle. The Congo Basin contains the second-largest river system in the world by discharge volume and plays a central role in maintaining regional ecosystems, supporting agricultural productivity, sustaining fisheries, and regulating flooding and drought, and yet the hydrological system remains poorly monitored. The Observatory aims to tackle this data gap by generating high-resolution, spatially distributed hydrological data and developing robust models of water flow, storage, and variability across the Congo Basin.
Lead researchers and institutions
The Observatory is led by Prof Raphael Tshimanga (University of Kinshasa, DRC) and Dr Bernadette Nka Nnomo (Hydrological Research Centre, Cameroon), supported by Prof Mark Trigg (University of Leeds, UK).
CRAFT also supports a PhD student, an MSc student, a post-doctoral researcher and a technician at CRREBaC at the University of Kinshasa; a PhD student, an MSc student and technician at the Institute of Hydrology in Cameroon; and a PhD student based at Leeds University in the UK. To read more about each of the scholarship research projects in the Hydrology and Freshwater Observatory, click here.
Research objectives
This Observatory builds on the Congo basin Catchment Information System, focusing on maintaining and expanding collection of water levels, discharge, surface water extent, groundwater table depths, soil moisture, and water storage volumes. These localised high-accuracy field measurements, including the installation of new monitoring stations, will be used, for the first time, to validate and calibrate satellite remotely sensed data, in order to scale the measurements from selected rivers to the region.
The three key work programmes for the Observatory are:
- Installation of new river monitoring stations in three regions of the Congo basin where we have not worked before: the Kasai River in DRC, the Sangha River and tributaries in Cameroon, and the Cuvette Centrale region (location of the Central Congo peatland) in DRC.
- Evaluation of the impacts of ongoing and future river basin management and engineering initiatives, such as the building of hydroelectric dams and water transfer projects, particularly on large urban populations.
- Assessment of how changes in water surface elevations and the connectivity of rivers to wetlands influences the central Congo peatlands, in order to understand how any changes may affect fishing in the peatlands, a major livelihood activity, and how any changes in these flows may affect the globally significant storage of carbon in the water-logged peat soil.
Links to other observatories
The Hydrology and Freshwater Observatory will work closely with the Climate Observatory to capture the importance of rainfall in the hydrological modelling; with the Vegetation Observatory to assess signs of stress in peatland vegetation; and with the Socio-ecology Observatory, who will be working with local communities to monitor their customary territories than include peatlands.
News and publications
CRAFT Partners
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