General comments

This research aims to explore participatory water resource research approaches in the Peruvian Andes at the interface of science, community and decision-making. As stated by the authors, these approaches have barely been implemented in common – often natural-science-dominated – water resource research. Such an endeavour is highly complex and requires careful research design and local participation since early project implementation. While overall, I find this study well-written, a topic highly relevant and timely, and important for future research agendas in the Peruvian Andes and beyond, I have several concerns regarding the depth and meaningfulness of the presented findings and “key lessons” mentioned by the authors. Therefore, I suggest a thorough revision of the described methods, their scope and related outcomes in order to more strongly work out most relevant and novel key findings according to the experiences and data collected in the field.

Specific comments

Abstract:

From a first read, some of the presented “main learnings” (or “key lessons” as stated afterwards) do not seem striking to me to justify the meaningfulness of this research. The “importance of in-person engagement” (to include local stakeholders) is broadly known – but difficult to achieve – and the “need for co-produced knowledge and solutions” is in most cases the key pillar of participatory research and decision-making processes. Highlighting these aspects as two out of four key findings this research has produced, probably misses the opportunity to provide local insights – whether specific to the catchment or valid beyond – and discuss major bottlenecks and perspectives to advance participatory research in a meaningful way as desired by many but probably only achieved by a few researchers in this field.

Methods:

The multi-method approach with the Nuestro Rio app seems quite novel and interesting to me. However, I have several doubts and concerns, probably some of them owed to the short description of them.

1) It is not clear if the research design has been part of a co-production process with local stakeholders since the beginning of the project, or if the entire research framework including the app and interviews were developed by the researchers only. If I understand right, you have only used quantitative-qualitative data and descriptive statistics (lines 57-58) for this development. If this is true, then the lack of key stakeholder participation in the research design stage should be discussed as a possible shortcome or bias. Or in other words: relevant questions not being asked cannot (necessarily) be identified afterwards. This also represents a point for future improvement (section 4).

2) It is not clear why the semi-structured interviews – in most qualitative research a key pillar to produce local insights – have been conducted but not considered in this paper. What are the reasons behind? Would the findings from the interviews not have substantially contributed to construct more in-depth key findings as discussed above?

3) Considering the experiences of (several Peruvian!) authors of this research with indigenous communities, why have you not opted for creating an app version in Quechua language? As stated by the authors (lines 111-116), language is a barrier and might considerably influence the quality of responses, willingness to participate and thus lead to biased results, particularly in regions and communities where Quechua is the mother language and Spanish still perceived as the colonial or upper-urban class language. You cannot change this at this point anymore but should clearly attribute this fact as a potential shortcome and bias to your results, and recommend such approaches to future research.

4) Please include a brief statement about the selection and representativeness of the participants. What were the criteria to approach them? Were you able to include a broad intersection of community members in terms of age, gender, socio-economic status, local water resource challenges, among others?

5) Was the “return of knowledge” to the communities (lines 107, 148-149), actually an important aspect for long-term work, research ethics and communications, part of your project design? Which activities were implemented to guarantee a maximal return flow of knowledge, implications and lessons learnt, and thus benefit to local communities?

6) The Figure and concrete links to the represented data in the text should be improved. Which patterns of water quality can be identified according the Nuestro Rio survey? There is not even one single reference to Figure 1 in your text. Does the variable size of the photos mean anything (i.e. better/worse water quality)? The photos are hard to read and a legend with symbols for each photo could help to understand which water quality issue has been identified in each case (if a sort of major “water quality issue categories” is feasible). Also add at least main cartographic elements, such as a scale and coordinates, at least for the small overview maps. It seems Figure 1 belongs to “Results” (or here: “Key lessons”) rather than “Methods”.

Key lessons:

As mentioned above (Abstract), I would strongly suggest to lift the key findings to a higher level. I would delete or rewrite sections 3.1 (“The importance of in-person engagement”) and 3.4 (“Need for co-produced knowledge and solutions”) which naturally represent the essence of participation, mutual exchange and knowledge production. Instead, you can further explain e.g. a) what the best strategies were to engage people (e.g. incentives you generally mention; to guarantee an environment where they are willing and feel comfortable to transparently respond), b) which limitations you were dealing with during the research (e.g. distrust and previous negative experiences of communities with researchers; comprehension of the technical details and scientific language), and c) what the implications and tangible results of your research are (e.g. if the results can now directly be used for other research; what the return value of this research for local implications and benefit is).

Are most of the outcomes specific to the respective subcatchment conditions (e.g. local conflict over water resources; acid rock drainage) or can (some of them) be understood as key lessons for the Santa river basin and beyond?

Recommendations for future participatory environmental research:

I like several points raised here. One important point: how can the challenges from completely different timeframes (lines 133-135) of short research frameworks and publication pressure compared to long-term work with communities to understand each other and to build trust be overcome or at least improved?

Try to be as specific as possible within this short GC piece. Sentences such as “Effective design of participatory research can play a crucial role here” are quite general. They need to be put into clear context (e.g. what “effective” means; “can play” sounds quite vague).

As mentioned above, include the importance of co-produced research design and local language focus (Quechua) for future participatory science-community approaches.

Technical corrections

The text is well and technically correctly written.

One single comment: avoid colloquial or exaggerated language, such as “incredibly important” (line 44) or “immensely valuable” (line 68).

General Comments:

This is a good start on an article intended to share lessons from a "participatory" project that elicited perceptions of water quality from several communities in the upper portion of the Rio Santa watershed in the Andes of Peru. With that said, it may be better to publish this manuscript as a research note than a scientific article and to change the framing of participatory to one of citizen science (quite different). While the subject matter of the manuscript is within the scope of Geoscience Communication, the manuscript does not place the research project and results within existing work on the several topics with which the authors engage. For example, the project is labeled as participatory, but it is unclear how residents of the Rio Santa valley - the Callejon de Huaylas - participated other than using an app given to them (on cellphones? not clearly stated in the methods section). Also, there is a limited engagement with the vast water governance literature for the Peruvian Andes. Furthermore, while this seems to be a citizen science project, there is no outlined citizen science framework for the reader to place this project in. It almost seems like a research project that did a limited literature review before engaging in "participatory" research ... On the other hand the conclusion, that points towards more integrated water quality monitoring which includes both data collection with instruments and citizen engagement to elicit perceptions of quality, is timely and important. This conclusion may be valid but needs to be better substantiated by placing the research in existing literature frameworks and providing more details on the "participatory" method used. For this reason I recommend a major revision.

Note: for all the suggested citations below, see who cites them in recent literature ...

Specific Comments:

Figure 1: 

The map is clear an has good design, but it is not clear why some photographs are bigger than others. It is also not clear what criteria was used to choose which points have photos. I found myself wanting a section in the methods to briefly describe how the survey instrument was used/analyzed to categorized water quality as good, neutral, or bad. Also how the sites were chosen, or how participants were chosen?

Lessons Learned:

In person engagement: I would like to know how long the project lasted and what plans there are to make the engagement sustainable. For example, will there be an ongoing campaign to encourage people to continue to use the app? Was there "participation" in the design of the survey questions and the app itself? Was there "participation" in designing the project activities? Whatever the answer may be, it would be great to know a little more about this.

Challenges of digital (in)accessibility: I am fairly certain there is a decade long history of using smart-phones for various research project in this region (as an example, Bury et al. 2013. New geographies of water and climate change in Peru: Coupled natural and social transformations in the Santa River Watershed, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 103(2), 363-374.) It would be great to link some of the previous work in this area to this water monitoring project. In the same way, there is plenty of literature on app design and problems with engaging citizens in digital data collection on devices (especially for map based apps, a good starting point might be Haklay, M., & Tobón, C. (2003). Usability evaluation and PPGIS: towards a user-centered design approach. International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 17(6), 577-592. https://doi.org/10.1080/1365881031000114107).

Need for co-produced knowledge and solutions: I once again find myself wanting to see more engagement with existing literature on this topic. Maybe Ostrom, E. (1996). Crossing the great divide: Coproduction, synergy, and development. World Development, 24(6), 1073-1087. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6VC6-3VW1PS3-9/2/ef9e7e3fd45a5cfda5b6b045ca20105e and/or Budds, J., & Hinojosa, L. (2012). Restructuring and Rescaling Water Governance in Mining Contexts: The Co-Production of Waterscapes in Peru. Water Alternatives, 5(1), 119-137. is a good place to start. I also really want to know how the perception data was combined with any existing measured water quality data (pH, turbidity, salinity, heavy metals, etc. etc. etc.). As noted in the conclusion, this combination may be a more powerful way to assess water quality ... co-production ...

Complexity of "water quality" as an environmental concept: Yes, this is difficult. I have also worked with Andean communities and water quality. I struggle to see this project as participatory other than engaging informants (like old school ethnology). For many readers participatory might mean an interpreting reality together, the line between "participants" and "researchers" becomes blurred, but in this manuscript a division between the participants and researchers is maintained ... good starting points here might be Pain, R., & Francis, P. (2003). Reflections on participatory research. Area, 35(1), 46-54. https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-4762.00109 and/or Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum. I find myself wanting to know what observations might have been made in the semi-structured interviews ... perhaps in these results are the insights for co-produced knowledge about water quality.

Technical corrections:

None, the paper is readable.

General Comments:

The aim of this Geoscience Communication manuscript is to share insights from participatory research on water quality in the Rio Santa basin of Peru. More specifically, the focus is on (or should be on) the use of a novel methodology or tool – the Nuestro Rio photo elicitation app – to improve the participatory research process in several key ways. These topics are certainly within the scope of the journal, and I expect with minor to moderate revisions the manuscript will be suitable for publication as a GC Insights article.

Specific Comments:

My chief, and really only, concern with the manuscript at present is that the novel contribution – the Nuestro Rio app – is not always front and center. On their own, the four key lessons learned are not especially surprising. The value added, and the reason the manuscript merits publication as a GC Insight article, is due to the ability of the Nuestro Rio app to help address these four issues and improve research outcomes to the benefit of the research team and local communities in the basin. Hence, I would suggest the “lessons learned” be explicitly framed around how the app helps to address these issues/challenges to participatory water quality research, or can be improved upon in the future to do so. While this suggestion is one that cuts across the entire manuscript (i.e., it requires revising everything from the abstract through to the recommendations and conclusions), it is largely a matter of reframing the existing text, rather than wholesale rewriting.

Technical Corrections:

These are all quite minor suggestions, so take them or leave them as you see fit!

In the first sentence of the abstract, you use the term “water security”, while the research is centered on “water quality”. You note the important water security implications in the introduction, but given the overarching focus of the paper is on water quality you might want to use this word in that first sentence.

The acronym TEK is defined for “traditional ecological knowledge”, but since you only use the acronym one more time thereafter, there’s really no need to use the acronym in the first place.

Make sure to define any concepts that you introduce (e.g., food-water-energy nexus), or alternatively avoid using them entirely if they are not germane to the focus of the manuscript.

While the research project is certainly interdisciplinary, which you note several times, it is also fully transdisciplinary. You might want to include this term in conjunction with interdisciplinary, just to reinforce the strong connections between the research project and non-academic stakeholders.

I am familiar with the use of the term cosmovisión in Spanish, but I am not sure how widely used it is in English. Unless your aim is to communicate something deeper – drawing on deeper cultural meaning embedded in the term – then I would replace it with “worldview” (or alternatively elaborate on the meaning of cosmovisión).