Peru Watershed Data for the Arequipa Region

Surface water quality in southern Peru has been monitored for over a century. However, the information is distributed among different organizations, in different formats, and is available with considerable delay after official request. A substantial portion of the data has not been quality assured. Much of the data is available in difficult-to-access formats such as scanned PDFs. The diverse heterogeneity of the data and format make it very difficult to use it to conduct meaningful water quality analysis. In this remarkable effort, we gathered all available surface water quality information from five main watersheds in the Arequipa Region of southern Peru: Camaná, Chili, Ocoña, Tambo, and Yauca. The effort required manual entry of more than 130 thousand records (distributed among 29 general chemistry and nutrient parameters, 49 metals, 20 bacterium types, and 77 organic types) from 276 stations (1905-2021, the majority being generated in the last two decades) that were merged into one master Excel database to be available to the general public for further analysis. With this new Excel database, surface water quality information is now available in an organized and easy-to-work-with format, contributing to better research and further decision making for a better environment.