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Independent since 2009

The river feeds sixty million people. Somebody has to count the fish.

We are a small research trust working on freshwater ecosystems across the Lower Mekong basin. We publish what we find, including the parts that are inconvenient, and we train the people who will still be here in thirty years.

Riverside vegetation in morning light

Seasonal wetland margin, Nong Khai province. Photographed during the 2026 low water survey.

1,148fish species recorded in the basin
19monitoring stations we read every month
63peer reviewed papers since 2009
412field researchers trained, most of them local
Our work

Three questions we keep asking

Everything we do comes back to whether the river can still support the people living on it.

Mist over the main channel

Flow and sediment

Upstream dams have changed when the water arrives and how much silt comes with it. We measure both, monthly, at nineteen points.

Read the 2026 flow report
Flooded forest in the delta

Flooded forest

The seasonally flooded forest is the nursery for most of the commercial catch. It is also the habitat nobody has a map of.

See the habitat atlas
Fishers at dawn

Fisheries and households

What a falling catch actually does to a village budget, tracked across 240 households in four countries since 2014.

Browse the household panel
You cannot manage what nobody has bothered to measure.
Dr Pimchanok Thanarat, founding director, in evidence to the Basin Commission, March 2026
Riverbank plants
About the trust

Small, independent, and slightly stubborn

The trust was set up in 2009 by four researchers who could not get anyone to fund a long baseline study. Sixteen years later the baseline is the reason our data gets used in arbitration.

We take no money from dam operators or from companies with a concession in the basin. Roughly two thirds of our funding is public research grants, the rest is small donations. Our accounts are published every March.

We are eleven people. Nine of them are in the field more than half the year.

Team

Who does the counting

Pimchanok ThanaratFounding director, hydrology
Sunan WiriyaFisheries lead
Nou KanhaFlooded forest programme
Marta RuizData and modelling
Research

Recent publications

All 63 papers
2026 Sediment starvation and bank retreat in the middle reach, 2009 to 2025
Thanarat P, Ruiz M, Wiriya S. Journal of Freshwater Ecology PDF 2025 Household income elasticity to catch volume in four riparian provinces
Wiriya S, Kanha N. Ecological Economics PDF 2025 A first habitat atlas of the seasonally flooded forest
Kanha N, Thanarat P. Trust monograph 11 PDF 2024 Migration timing of three commercial cyprinids under altered flow
Ruiz M, Wiriya S. Fisheries Management and Ecology PDF