Latvia 2

Elina Kolodinska (18)

City/Region: Riga E-mail: elinakolodinska@hotmail.com Hobbies: Listening to music, singing, drawing and traveling Career: Chemist School: Imanta Latvian Gymnasium

Liga Zala (18)

City/Region: Riga E-mail: ligazala@hotmail.com Hobbies: Cycling, skiing, reading interesting books, taking part in interesting activities Career: Biologist School: Imanta Latvian Gymnasium

The influence of anthropogenic factors on the River Misa

Latvia is in the privileged position of still having more than half of its land area covered by forests, meadows, and swamps. But while many of Latvia's 13,000 small rivers may be less polluted than in the rest of Europe, Elina and Liga still wanted to bring to the attention of their local population the problems of environmental pollution. Elina and Liga wanted to investigate the influence of humans on the ecology of the Misa River and to produce an information leaflet to raise public awareness. The chemistry and microbiology of the river was investigated along three sections of the river. The relative abundance of the wide-clawed river crayfish as an indicator of clean water was also studied. They found the river to meet environmental standards in all the sections of the river, but marked pollution was found along a stretch of the river heavily populated with summer cottages. And they showed that the numbers the wide-clawed river crayfish have diminished recently due to illegal catching. Clearly increasing urbanisation along rivers in Latvia is, as the girls point, having a major negative environmental impact.