Scientific Research
Thanks to the passion and committment of 3 generations of scientists from all parts of the world (mainly Kenya, Great Britain, The Netherlands), Naivasha is today one of the most investigated tropical lake basins worldwide. New concepts, models and monitoring techniques are being tested to refine our understanding of common issues in tropical lake ecology. Some of the themes of recent research attempts include: ecohydrological control of physical processes, ecosystem services associated to riparian wetlands, local drivers of regional climate change, alien species interactions and their exploitation for provisional services, fish ecotoxicology, changes in aquatic trophic chains under the impact of alien species.
Foreign scientists are unable to maintain regular monitoring activites that are necessary to produce long term data series. This is why, at Lake Naivasha, young resident volunteers established monitoring groups trained by Naivasha Basin Sustainability Initiative, by WWF and by Nature-Kenya.
These "Citizen scientists" provide a great deal of information about the state of their environment and are of great support to scientists who try to understand the causes that drive environmental changes in the Basin.
