IGRAC, INOWAS, DEMEAU and IAH launch global MAR portal

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IGRAC has developed a portal on MAR sites in collaboration with INOWAS, DEMEAU and the IAH MAR commission. This MAR portal enables users to search and freely access valuable information on MAR sites globally. 

Since many of the existing MAR sites offer excellent best-practice examples that can be very useful for planning and implementation of new projects, the purpose of the project is to promote MAR applications worldwide through a dedicated webGIS platform. About 1200 case studies from over 50 countries from Europe, Asia, Africa, North and South America, and Oceania were collected, analysed and compiled in the first global inventory of MAR schemes. 

The resulting MAR inventory does not claim 100 percent coverage of all MAR applications worldwide. Nevertheless, several deviations and similarities can be observed in terms of motivation for MAR implementation (driven mostly by different climatic and socio-economic conditions and measured in number of sites available per region and quality of the data reported), but also in terms of type of influent water source, method selected and, the most important, the project objectives and final use of reclaimed water. 

The global MAR inventory is the result of a team of researchers from several European institutions. All case studies, except from Europe, were collected by a team at Technische Universität Dresden within the framework of the BMBF-funded project INOWAS (Innovative web-based decision support system for water sustainability under a changing climate). The European case studies were collected and analysed by a consortium of researchers from Germany, Netherlands and Spain within the framework of the EU-funded project DEMEAU (Demonstration of promising technologies to address emerging pollutants in water and waste water). The visualisation of the MAR inventory on the GIS-based portal (GGIS) is provided by IGRAC while the whole project is supervised by the IAH-MAR Commission of the International Association of Hydrogeologists.

Access to the MAR portal

To increase its availability and facilitate continuous update, the global MAR inventory is made available on a web-based GIS platform. In the first stage (November 2015), the inventory contains only the site name, coordinates, MAR type and the reference. In the next stages (over the next several months), the web-based platform will include further layers such as the year when the MAR scheme went into operation, the annual volume of recharge, the source of infiltration water, the aquifer type, the final use of recovered water, as well as the main objectives of the project.

Get involved

If you have information to update and correct site data in this database, or if you have new MAR sites that should be included in the database, please get in touch and help us to improve access to information on MAR sites. Official announcement of the MAR Portal and discussion on how the global MAR community can be involved in this project will be made at the International Symposium on Managed Aquifer Recharge (ISMAR9), 20-24 June 2016 Mexico City.

More information on project partners

INOWAS project (Innovative web-based decision support system for water sustainability under a changing climate)
DEMEAU project (Demonstration of promising technologies to address emerging pollutants in water and waste water)
IAH-MAR Commission of the International Association of Hydrogeologists