Riu.net

RIU.net is an interactive educative tool that enables to evaluate the ecological quality of river ecosystems. In addition, it provides scientific data that will be available on the website www.RiuNet.net to be consulted by experts, environmental managers and the general public.

On a mobile phone, RIU.net offers users a diagnose protocol to determine the health status of a river while they learn how rivers are, what types of rivers are there, how do they work, what problems do humans cause to them and, particularly, which organisms live in them, how are they grouped and classified, what level of pollution do they tolerate, how do they live, etc.

Obtained data will allow developing future scientific studies with diverse aims. Thanks to your help, it will be possible, for instance, to know better the distribution of invertebrates in the rivers of the Iberian Peninsula or to identify which parts of a drainage basin, like the Ebro River, are in a better ecological status. Moreover, if there is an isolated pollution problem in a river, the app can be very useful because it enables a non-expert user to quickly evaluate it in an autonomous way.

RIU.net has been created by the research group Freshwater Ecology and Management (FEM) in the Department of Ecology at the University of Barcelona, within the mobile project of the University of Barcelona.

The app RIU.net has been developed with funds provided by the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT) of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and a grant of the programme RecerCaixa.