“Water availability is one of Honduras’ most challenging public services,” Sánchez-Murillo says. “During prolonged dry seasons, many people must resort to buying expensive bottled water or water imported from other basins.”
To seek solutions, Sánchez-Murillo and an international team of researchers spent the last three years tracing Tegucigalpa’s water supply from rainstorm to faucet. They monitored rainfall at various elevations and collected precipitation samples from groundwater and surface water sources, including springs, drilled wells, boreholes, and streams. Using this data, they created mathematical models to understand at which locations the water is recharged, which occurs when rainwater is absorbed by aquifers following storms.
This allowed them to produce detailed maps of water sources in the Choluteca River basin, charting for the first time geographic areas integral to water recharge for municipal water regulation, protection, and conservation.
The team’s findings, reported in the journal Science of the Total Environment, show that areas critical to recharge are currently stressed by agricultural land use, deforestation, and forest degradation caused by an invasive insect.