This June, we held a day of river monitoring around the river Teme catchment. Volunteers gathered samples from over 10 locations and brought them to a local village hall, where they were met by staff from Severn Trent, Environment Agency, Water Rangers and Severn Rivers Trust. We took bottles of water away for lab analysis, and then split the rest so that we could trial a number of different methods and pieces of equipment. The idea is to compare how easy kit is to use, what types of data they give us, and consider how accurate and reliable they are when deployed in the field with volunteers. This will help us decide which methods to focus on for our future investigations.
After a hearty lunch, Kate Ashley (River Engagement Officer and SRT lead for the CaSTCo project) gave a presentation to the volunteers showing them the results of their monitoring so far, and sharing a draft version of the GIS map we have been developing. This shows graphs and data from all of our monitoring points, combined with other sources of information to help start building a picture of river health and how it is changing over time.
The waterblitz trials and Teme monitoring are being delivered as part of the national Catchment Systems Thinking Cooperative (CaSTCo). The river Teme is one of nine demonstrators across the country, working to create a framework so that community monitoring is part of river recovery here in the UK.
A huge thank you to all our volunteers and partners who made the day such a success. We’re looking forward to sharing the results of our efforts in the near future.
The team from Water Rangers put together a short video about the day. We were also featured on the local BBC news – thanks to our brilliant volunteer Susie for showing Ellen the reporter around your site and demonstrating the monitoring methods as well as doing an interview for the radio!
