Tojquia, Guatemala, Fog Collection Project – March 2011

Melissa Rosato has just spoken to the people in the village and the news is excellent. The Large Fog Collectors have again performed very well through the dry winter season. All family water tanks are full and all the fog collectors that FogQuest has built since 2006 are in good working condition.

We also are collecting information in the nearby village of Siete Piños to determine if it is viable to start a new water project there.

New Books – February 2011

There are several books that have come out recently that will be of interest to visitors to our site. One is on Tropical Montane Cloud Forests by Sampurno Bruijnzeel and co-authors. These forests receive a large portion of their water input from the fog that covers them during significant parts of the year. Also, Pilar Cereceda, an active member of FogQuest, and Ana Maria Errazuriz have written an Atlas of Chile and the World, which has been published by the largest Spanish educational publisher for use in schools in Chile. The first order was for 300,000 copies!

Bruijnzeel LA, Scatena FN, Hamilton LS. (eds.). 2010.
Tropical Montane Cloud Forests. Science for Conservation and Management
Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK, 768 pp.
www.cambridge.org/9780521760355

Fog Collection Project in Morocco – January 2011

FogQuest is discussing the schedule for the construction of 15 Large Fog Collectors (LFCs) with the leader of the project, Dr. Jamila Bargach, Director, Dar Si-Hmad, Sidi Ifni, Morocco. She is presently arranging the funding.

It is expected that FogQuest will have at least one person in the field in July to direct the construction phase and to work with the people of the villages, Dar Si-Hmad staff, and Professor Victoria Marzol (FogQuest member) who has carried out the field evaluation over the last four years.

The project is designed to benefit three villages and at least one large school. It will consist of fog collectors, pipelines and one or more cisterns.

New Fog Collection Site Initiated in Chile, November 2010

The village of Peña Blanca, about 400 km north of Santiago, is located in a region that has extensive fog in the coastal mountains. In November, Pilar Cereceda, Professor of Geography at the Catholic University in Santiago, and Fernanda Rojas, FogQuest volunteer, built a Large Fog Collector in Peña Blanca as a training exercise for students who we hope will be FogQuest volunteers in the years to come. The project site will also be used for a comparison of a donated material to the Raschel mesh that FogQuest uses in its projects. Ultimately, we would like to develop the site as an operational fog collection project to benefit the village.

New Overview Paper on Fog Collection, November 2010

Otto Klemm, the Chair of the 5th International Conference on Fog, Fog Collection and Dew that was held in Muenster, Germany, has taken the lead in preparing a paper summarizing the present status of fog collection in the world. It has been submitted to the scientific journal ERDKUNDE and is in the review process now.

The paper is:
Fog as a Fresh-water Resource: Overview and Perspectives

Contributing Scholars: Otto Klemm1, Robert S. Schemenauer, Anne Lummerich, Pilar Cereceda, Victoria Marzol, David Corell, Johan van Heerden, Dirk Reinhard, Tseggai Gherezghiher, Jana Olivier, Pablo Osses, Jamal Sarsour, Ernst Frost, María Estrela, José Valiente, Gebregiorgis Mussie Fessehaye

Tanzania, New Project – November 2010

A new project to evaluate the fog collection potential in the central highlands of Tanzania, south of Arusha, is underway.

The lead on the project is our partner NGO in Germany, p(e)d-world. They have established formal contacts with a local NGO and with schools and villages in need of clean water. With guidance from FogQuest, the first small SFC was installed in October by Joachim Holst, a volunteer from Germany.

Initial results look promising and when more information is available an entry in the Current Projects section will be written.

Nepal visit – October 2010

Tony Makepeace, a long-serving director of FogQuest, was in Nepal in October to visit the Pathivara (Temple) site near Ilam in the east of the country and to start a new initiative in Katmandu. The two 40 m2 fog collectors at the temple have worked very well for a year and produce about 500 liters of water a day for the monks and visitors. Tony also works with another organization, NCDF, that supports Nepal and together we are working with a small sustainable development company,FoST, to see whether an affordable Medium Fog Collector can be built centrally for installation around Nepal.

A short video of this project can be seen here in the video section.

Tojquia, Guatemala, Fog Collection Project, August 2010

FogQuest volunteers Melissa Rosato (Canada) and Fernanda Rojas (Chile) were back in Tojquia in August to expand the village water project. There are now 35 Large Fog Collectors installed on a family by family basis. This is the largest fog collection project that is presently operating in the world. It produces an average of approximately 7000 liters of fog water per day, in the dry season. Assisting Melissa and Fernanda were 24 students and teachers from several countries. They were affiliated with the British based organization Round Square International Schools.

This continues the cooperation between RSIS and FogQuest and provides invaluable experience in development projects to the students while helping FogQuest carry out important construction and social tasks in the field. A brief report prepared by Melissa on the work in August is linked here:  Guatemala August 2010 Short Summary.

Conference July 2010

The 5th International Conference on Fog, Fog Collection and Dew was held in Muenster, Germany in late July. More information can be found here. Melissa Rosato gave a paper on the Tojquia water project (see here) that she co-authored with Fernanda Rojas and Robert Schemenauer. The title of the paper is:

Not just beneficiaries: fostering participation and local management capacity in the Tojquia fog-collection project, Guatemala.

The file is linked below:

Rosato, Rojas, Schemenauer 2010 Final Draft

Robert Schemenauer gave an invited overview paper on fog collection at the conference. This helped spur interest in careful comparisons of new materials that may be useful in future versions of fog collectors. FogQuest encourages such comparisons and can provide Raschel mesh, which is used in our Standard Fog Collectors and our Large Fog Collectors, to interested groups.