Peru Watershed Data for the Arequipa Region

Surface water quality has been monitored in southern Peru for over a century, but the information is only available from various organizations with considerable delay after official requests. A substantial portion of the data have not been quality assured and were available in difficult-to-access formats such as scanned PDF documents, which made it difficult to evaluate water quality trends. In this project, we gathered all available surface water quality information from five watersheds in the Arequipa Region of southern Peru: Camaná, Chili, Ocoña, Tambo, and Yauca. The effort required entry of more than 130 thousand records of general chemistry, nutrients, and parameters, metals, organic compounds, and biological taxa from 276 stations. The water quality records span the years 2012 to 2021 for most data, but Chili does include data starting from 1905. This paper describes how the water quality data were assimilated and provides one master Excel database so that the surface water quality data can be used for research and decision making.