Rivers in Indonesia have experienced a significant decline in water quality in recent years. For example, several recent studies have discussed the Cikapundung River in Bandung, the Progo River in Yogyakarta, the Serayu River, the Bengawan Solo River, and the Brantas River in East Java.

Polluted/poor-quality rivers have the potential to worsen groundwater quality. Of course, this will become an alarming situation if there are no actions to improve water quality, especially in river bodies.

With these challenges, residents and communities in the Brantas River Basin (DAS) have not stood idly by. They have made real contributions to several activities to improve water quality and the environment.

Unfortunately, most of the environmental activities that have been carried out have not been documented.

The Water Resources Engineering (WRE) Department at Universitas Brawijaya (UB) wishes to identify and learn from the various actions related to water quality that have been carried out by the general public in the Brantas Basin.

BrantaSae website (https://brantasae.ub.ac.id/) is a web-based map application offered by WRE, which is designed as a forum for sharing knowledge and activities about water quality actions in the Brantas River Basin (DAS).

WRE built this website with the concept of Public Science. The general public can collaborate with academics in collecting, writing, classifying, and/or analyzing data that can increase our understanding of a subject in the scientific realm.

BrantaSae was developed in collaboration between the WRE UB and the Department of Water Management of Delft University of Technology and Hanzehogeschool Groningen from the Netherlands.

The BrantaSae website was built by taking ideas from the sister portal ClimateScan, which has been used by more than 5000 climate adaptation actions internationally.

BrantaSae has been developing since June 2021 and was introduced to the public at the WINNER Conference last October 2022.

The name of the BrantaSae website has several meanings. In Javanese, it has two meanings; Brantas Ae, there is only one Brantas and Brantas Sae, Brantas is always in good condition, or Brantas always gives goodness.

In English, BrantaSae stands for Brantas Basin System of Assessment and Environmental Research.

On October 19, 2022, Sebrian Mirdeklis Beselly Putra, S.T., M.T., M.Eng., WRE UB representative, and Prof. Floris Boogaard from Hanzehogeschool Groningen, presented a presentation about BrantaSae in a session at the WINNER conference.

WINNER (https://winner.or.id/) is an initiative created by the Royal Netherlands Embassy for Indonesia, Nuffic Neso Indonesia, Indonesian Academy of Young Scientists (ALMI), National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN), the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), and the Dutch Research Council (NWO).

This year, WINNER was held in a hybrid manner and was opened by the Minister of Education, Culture, and Science of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the Minister of Education and Culture and Research and Technology Nadiem Makariem.

WRE UB hopes that this website can be used not only by the general public but also academics and the government to share water quality improvement activities, learn from each other, and be able to find good solutions to improve water quality.

“This is a concrete form of WRE’ contribution as a center for knowledge of water resources in solutions to improve water quality and the environment,” Sebrian concluded. (HumasFT)