On our way back from the Mara Day celebrations, we stopped by the Emarti Bridge, near Olerai Farms, to show Emma and Pat one of our study sites. There we found a group of guys installing one of 17 new staff gauges being installed throughout the Mara River Basin in a joint effort by the Nile Basin Initiative's Mara River Basin Project and the Kenya and Tanzania water management authorities.
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| Me and Emma with the fellows installing the gauging station |
You can see in the pictures below the impressive infrastructure going into installing these stations. This pipe is being buried down to the water level in a ~15 m tall bank, and a float inside will automatically record the river level on a regular basis.
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| A gauging station being installed at Emarti Bridge |
This is a tremendously exciting development for the basin, as it will allow the management authorities to better monitor the river's flow level and water extraction levels and to determine when the reserve flows (minimum flows which should be left in the river) are being impacted. I thought this was a perfect finale for Mara Day!
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