MAR Portal presented at ISMAR9 in Mexico City

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From Monday 20 June till Friday 24 June, IGRAC will be represented at the 9th International Symposium on MAR (ISMAR9) that is being held at the Palace of Mines in Mexico City. During this symposium hosted by UNAM, IGRAC will present the recently launched MAR portal. This portal developed by IGRAC shows all results from the global inventory of MAR schemes conducted by the University of Dresden.

About the MAR Portal

To increase its availability and facilitate continuous update, the global MAR inventory is made available free of charge on a web-based GIS platform, which is part of IGRAC's Global Groundwater Information System (GGIS). In the first stage (November 2015), the inventory only contained the site name, coordinates, MAR type and the reference. In the next stages, the web-based platform has been expanded with further layers such as the year when the MAR scheme went into operation, the source of infiltration water, the final use of abstracted water, as well as the main objectives of the project. All data presented in the MAR portal are results from the Global Inventory of MAR Schemes. Enter the MAR Portal here.

About the Global Inventory of MAR Schemes

Since many of the existing MAR schemes offer excellent best-practice examples that can be very useful for planning and implementation of new projects, the purpose of the present study is to promote MAR applications worldwide through a dedicated web GIS 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.