Temporal Variability and Annual Fluxes of Water, Sediment and Particulate Phosphorus from a Headwater River in the Tropical Andes: Results from a High-frequency Monitoring Program

Abstract:

The Mazar River Project, a high-frequency hydrological monitoring program, aims to generate ecohydrological information to inform watershed management in high-mountain areas of southern Ecuador. Rapid development of hydropower, accompanied by new and improved road networks, has resulted in swift changes in land-use and land cover in Ecuador’s tropical Andes, all of which underscore the need for detailed information on flow and sediment production from these river systems. National and regional payment for the protection of ecosystem services (PES) programs seek to target critical areas, such as these, for watershed conservation, but are often informed by minimal information on sustainable flows and impacts of land use activities. As part of a program to inform conservation and sustainable water management in the region, we established a hydrological monitoring station in southern Ecuador on the Mazar River, a tributary of the Paute River Basin, situated on the eastern Andean cordillera. The station is equipped with sensors to continuously monitor stream stage and turbidity and an automated sampler for event-based collection of stream water samples, providing high frequency data that reduces the uncertainty of observations. Here, we report observations of continuous runoff and turbidity over the first year of observation, present relationships between turbidity and concentrations of total suspended solids (TSS) and total particulate phosphorus (TP), and provide estimates of annual loads of TSS and TP. Runoff was highly variable over the monitoring period with flows ranging from less than 3 m³/s during baseflow to nearly 80 m³/s during the flood of record. During measured storm events, TSS exceeded 1000 mg/l with maximum measured concentrations exceeding 13 g/l during storm peaks. Turbidity was highly correlated with TSS, which was in turn highly correlated with TP, providing a robust data set for load estimation. We compare our results to other montane rivers in the tropical Andes and comment on the value of high frequency monitoring for load estimation. Our results provide important information for downstream hydropower operators on flow variability and demonstrate the importance of extreme events in the annual export of sediment and sediment-bound phosphorus in this system.