Water Quality Assessment of Fogafale Lagoon, Tuvalu

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Water Quality Assessment of Fogafale Lagoon, Tuvalu

As part of the Coastal Health Monitoring component of the Tuvalu IW R2R Project, baseline water quality surveys and analysis were carried from 14th to 17th September 2018. The coastal health monitoring program is designed to characterise ecological health of, and assess causal links between land based activities, and algal blooms and ciguatera occurrences in the Fogafale lagoon adjacent to populated areas of Funafuti atoll in Tuvalu. Baseline assessments of the Tafua pond, adjacent to the IW R2R demonstration dry-litter piggery site, was also conducted. We report on six measures of water quality: turbidity, dissolved oxygen, the dissolved nutrients nitrate- and nitrite-nitrogen, ammonical nitrogen, phosphate-phosphorous, and coliform counts. A selection of field samples were provided to the USP-IAS laboratory as a quality control measure of the analysis of nutrients by the field equipment YSI 9300 Photometer.