Student contributions sought for better monitoring of Mekong River
A competition has been launched to challenge university students to design technology to monitor the Mekong’s water level, rainfall, soil moisture, and water quality.
The River Monitoring Technology Competition, launched by the Mekong River Commission (MRC), is for students in the four regional countries of Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam.
The competition will receive entries from 15 selected universities in those four nations to design a “cost-effective, sustainable technology” to help protect the lifeblood for millions of fishing and farming families, the MRC stated.
The commission already maintains some 250 stations that monitor the hydrology, rainfall, water quality, ecological health, fisheries and drought that affect Southeast Asia’s largest river. Yet most of this technology depends on foreign equipment that is often expensive and sometimes outdated.
Minh Nga
