As part of the OTTERS project pilots, schools in Armenia have launched water quality monitoring activities to promote environmental stewardship and hands-on learning.On April 29, the American University of Armenia (AUA) organised a teacher training workshop in Gavar, engaging seven teachers from five public schools in the Gegharkunik region. Each school adopted a nearby river that feeds into Lake Sevan—one of Eurasia’s largest alpine lakes—and committed to weekly water quality measurements through the end of the year.
The training introduced a specially developed “Monitoring Water Quality: Toolkit for Educators,” created by the AUA Acopian Center for the Environment with the involvement of AUA students. The toolkit, available in both Armenian and English, provides background on Lake Sevan’s ecosystem, current challenges such as eutrophication, and detailed guidance on measuring indicators like pH, conductivity, ammonia, nitrates, and phosphates. Workshop participants also practiced field sampling in the Gavaraget River, with instruction from Dr. Garabet Kazanjian (AUA), who emphasized data accuracy and methodological consistency.
This training workshop was the second engagement activity with schools from the Lake Sevan basin. About the first one titled “Spring to Sevan Stewardship: Blue Education for Teachers,” you can read here. Apart from the aforementioned toolkits, students from AUA and Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) have prepared instructional step-by-step videos on water quality monitoring, both in Armenian and English, as support material to teachers and citizen science practitioners. These videos are available on the YouTube channel of the AUA Acopian Center here.
On May 16, participating schools showcased their preliminary results of water quality monitoring at the “Responsible for Sevan (R4S)” event, co-organized with the Environmental Protection of Lake Sevan (EU4Sevan) project and hosted at the Gavar Cultural Center.
The event opened with the introduction of the goals of the OTTERS project and the objectives of the Spring to Sevan Stewardship Campaign, emphasizing the significance of water quality monitoring and the need to ensure consistent, high-quality data collection from Dr. Kazanjian and Aida Papikyan, a researcher at OTTERS. Students from each school then presented preliminary results of their citizen science activities. By that point, each school had completed two to three rounds of field measurements. Participants also visited the local soil and water laboratory, gaining insight into sustainable land management practices.
The Poqrik Ishkhan Educational Complex in Yerevan joined the event to share its Getar River restoration project, marking the start of a Blue Schools collaboration across Armenia. The event brought together 10 teachers and 36 students, and marked additional success with three more schools joining the Spring-to-Sevan monitoring efforts, further expanding the initiative’s reach.
Participating schools, including Poqrik Ishkhan, recently received grants from the ProBleu Project, a sister initiative under the European Union (EU) Mission “Restore Our Ocean and Waters by 2030,” which aims to foster water literacy in schools. The event itself was supported by the EU4Sevan Project, co-funded by the EU and the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), and implemented by the German Society for International Cooperation (GIZ) and the United Nations Development Programme as part of the BMZ-financed ECOserve Programme.
The OTTERS Spring to Sevan Stewardship Campaign empowers students to actively monitor and protect the Lake Sevan Basin. By collecting and sharing water quality data, students not only contribute to scientific understanding but also strengthen their sense of environmental responsibility and civic agency. The initiative aims to build a generation of youth capable of driving change toward sustainable freshwater management in Armenia and beyond.
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The Mission Ocean OTTERS project has received funding from the European Commission’s Horizon Europe Coordination and Support Actions programme under Grant agreement No 101094041. The information and views of this article lie entirely with the authors. The European Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.
