Dominican Republic

About

The Dominican Republic is located between Puerto Rico, Jamaica and Cuba. The whole of its Northern Coast is on the Atlantic Ocean, and its entire Southern coast borders the Caribbean Sea. The Dominican Republic is an emblem of mass tourism with its famous beaches like Punta Cana and its Resorts, but the Sargassum problem impacts tourist visits to the country.

The Dominican Republic government is increasingly involved in the management of seaweed strandings, which are breaking records year after year. Even if the management of these events is mainly hotel groups’ responsibility since they heavily invest in floating barriers, the country’s government recognizes it is an extremely serious problem and is calling for a coordinated response from Caribbean states to Sargassum events.

The Dominican Republic has also acquired a satellite monitoring system to forecast Sargassum influxes- a concrete asset when trying to anticipate and manage Sargassum.

Comparison of seaweed strandings between 2018 and 2022 on a beach in the Dominican Republic

Source: Club Sentinelle, Guadeloupe

Videos

Retention and collection of Sargassum at sea in the Dominican Republic

It is in the Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, that we can find the longest anti-Sargassum barrier in the Caribbean. Every day, several dozen employees of Algeanova, maintain and harvest the algae accumulated against the barrier and thus preserve tourism, the Dominican Republic’s first resource.

Valorization of sargassum into compost in the Dominican Republic

The algae retained by the anti-Sargassum barriers are collected by the company Algeanova, which also takes care of their storage and their transformation into compost. After a 60-day process, the compost obtained is delivered to farmers, who benefit from an increased productivity and an improvement in the quality of their products.

Thematic sheet

Sheet 4: Retention and removal of Sargassum at sea

How to prevent Sargassum from reaching the coast? How to remove it once retained? Since 2011, Sargassum retention and collection solutions have been implemented throughout the Caribbean.

Document

Sargassum : an overview of Algeanova devices

After numerous studies and tests, Algéanova has developed an effective technique to retain and harvest the algae. A process that is exported to the entire Caribbean, from the Dominican Republic to Mexico.

(Cf Alliance Française)

Comics

Sargassum: Story(s) of a Brown Tide

“Sargassum: Story(s) of a Brown Tide” was written in the style of a role-playing game. Researchers are invited to come out of their laboratories to meet citizens, illustrators to return to the benches of the university to question the research, screenwriters to immerse themselves in the reality of fieldwork.

Led by the Alliance Française of Santo Domingo, the creation of this Caribbean and international documentary comic strip is intended to become a space for discussion and reflection on the environmental issue of Sargassum.

The sargassum monster

Tano, a young fisherman, discovers a seaweed monster invading the beaches of Pedernales. Helped by Taïno, an ancestral spirit, and a scientist, he will have to contain the invasion of the monster.

Writer: Jeissy Trompiz
Cartoonist: Elkys Nova
Scientists: Ulises Jauregui-Haza and Rolando Liranzo