COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: US-MEXICO Planning Visit: Mexican Urban Stream Ecology (MUSE)

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Cities directly influence the quality and quantity of water that moves through urban watersheds and to the human populations located downstream. Though impacted by development, urban rivers and streams provide important ecosystem services, including drinking water and stormwater drainage to surrounding human populations. However, urban rivers in developing economies, such as Mexico may be directly utilized by humans for sources of untreated drinking water, direct conduits for sewage, and freshwater fisheries. To appropriately manage urban watersheds in these regions, it is important to understand how biological communities and biological processes are affected by increasing urbanization. This proposal, the Mexican Urban Stream Ecology Collaboration (MUSE), will bring together group of stream ecologists, fish biologists, and students from the United States and Mexico to begin to understand the links among urbanization, stream ecology, and freshwater fisheries in southern Mexico. The activities conducted in MUSE will provide the foundation for greater understanding of urban stream ecology and urban fisheries throughout the world and will initiate a new collaboration that will generate knowledge and resources for scientists, students, and natural resource managers.Urbanization is considered to be an important driver of global decline in the integrity of streams and rivers; yet, affected systems continue to provide essential ecosystem services including stormwater drainage, drinking water, and freshwater fisheries. The influence of urbanization on the structure and trophic relationships of fishes and on the functional role of fishes in ecosystem processes is not well understood. Through MUSE, U.S. and Mexican researchers will begin to understand synergistic links among urbanization, biogeochemistry, and freshwater fisheries in southern Mexico. Specifically, MUSE researchers will investigate the influence of urbanization on freshwater fish communities and energy and nutrient dynamics in the Usumacinta-Grijalva watershed in Chiapas and Tabasco, Mexico. Through this project new scientific directions in urban ecology and tropical ecology will open for collaborating researchers and students.