Water reserve in the Acaponeta River, safeguard for Marismas Nacionales

Located along the coast of Nayarit and Sinaloa, Marismas Nacionales is an enormous wetland complex covering about one million hectares. This wetland supports 20% of the mangrove forests in Mexico, and is habitat of more than half a million birds and a variety of amphibians, reptiles and mammals, including the emblematic stork, crocodile, ocelot and jaguar.

The environmental and biological richness of Marismas Nacionales, with no comparison in northwest Mexico, is largely due to that fact that this wetland receives the drain of eight rivers from the Sierra Madre and, among them, the Acaponeta River.

These rivers still flow free and are not overexploited. However, there are not legal and administrative mechanisms to assure the long-term health of these rivers, threatened by the construction of dams, mining and overexploitations of wells.

Pronatura Noroeste collaborates with the National Water Reserve Program led by the National Water Commission (CONAGUA), which seeks to promote water reserves in priority watersheds. The initiative is unique in its kind, and intends estimate, analyze and suggest the volumes of water required to maintain both the economic activities and the health of the ecosystem. This volume of water has been called “environmental flow”.

The first of these projects is focused in the Acaponeta River watershed, which water reserve shall garantee that Marismas Nacionales will continue to receive the quantity and quality of water required to maintain its extraordinary flora and fauna.