Citizen scientists to monitor English rivers in £7m scheme

Data shows that the Environment Agency's new monitoring programme leaves waterways unguarded and that citizen scientists are being trained as the best hope to protect rivers.

A £7m programme to set up citizen science testing in 10 river catchments across England is under way in an attempt to standardize the way volunteers carry out the monitoring

The project aims to create thousands of volunteer scientists who will monitor their local rivers and provide a grassroots voice to protect them.

The Rivers Trust wants to have thousands of people volunteering and monitoring their local rivers. We can get another level of data from these surveys. We want to make sure that we know the data is reliable.

By the end of the three years of the project, we will see volunteers operating across the country because we want to bring in as many people as possible.

The goal is for the monitoring to complement a network of sensors and the information to be shared into a central platform. The project, which is led by the Rivers Trust and United Utilities, is funded through the first water breakthrough challenge of the water regulators Ofwat. The Environment Agency testing regime is no longer widespread or comprehensive enough according to Browning who set up a citizen science monitoring project.

The chemical quality of the river should be monitored by theEA. The new testing programme, adopted last year, involves randomly selected sites for testing.

Browning said that some of the river's have gone from being monitored to nothing. When there is no data at all, citizen science monitoring can empower communities and get them involved in understanding the issues in their rivers so that they can speak up and protect them, even if there is no data at all.

Communities in towns and villages are taking the local environment by the scruff of the neck and speaking up for rivers.

The data from the River Creedy shows that the tests have gone down in the last 20 years. Twelve sites were tested for phosphates on the Creedy annually in 2000. Sampling Frequency dropped to a low of four times a year in 2014, as testing began to decline. Monitoring of the original 12 sites was stopped last year. The sites have been replaced with randomly selected areas as part of the new spot test system and there were 67 tests at these new sites in 2021, compared with a high of 189 tests in 2002.

One of the new sample points is upstream of all the sewage discharges. The new system is likely to exaggerate the scale of water pollution.

The Creedy's detailed local level spatial analysis shows a huge shift in monitoring approach. Long-term sampling sites have been wound down and abandoned, new ones initiated with a much reduced sampling regime, and at random locations that are not representative of overall water quality at the waterbody scale.

In the last few years, funding for monitoring activity has gone down. The testing was designed to provide a robust assessment of the health of rivers over time. The emerging citizen science initiatives promised to deliver practical results in a collaborative manner.

The Environment Agency takes tens of thousands of water quality samples every year. Increased efficiency and technological advances have allowed us to focus our resources on areas that will benefit the environment the most.