Project Dates: 01.05.23 to 01.05.24

Rivers are in a perilous state with pollution from agriculture and sewage smothering aquatic habitats from the upper catchments to the estuaries and beaches. The main causes of this include:

• Intensive farming methods
• Land use changes, such as removing hedges and draining wetlands
• Sewage infrastructure not keeping pace with population increases
• Climate change, resulting in more floods and droughts.

The Westcountry Rivers Trust run a wonderful Citizen Science Investigation (CSI) project to engage local communities in monitoring the quality of their local waterways. The next stage is to empower local communities to understand the data and to ensure it is used to improve things.

The CSI Community Analysts project aims to work with leading Devon-based groups to build resources and train individuals to analyse pollution score cards themselves, testing the approach with other Devon communities before rolling it out across the region.

WRT aim to explore ways to encourage story-telling to communicate the findings to a wider audience alongside the technical analytics. The overarching goal is to interpret data more consistently and deeply – at catchment, county and regional level – to enable more effective targeting of WRT’s partner work and to hold polluters properly to account – ultimately to reduce pollution and enhance water quality.

Images courtesy of Westcountry Rivers Trust.

 

UPDATE January 2024: Explore the impact this project has had so far here!

 

IMPACT SUMMARY OCTOBER 2024: 

• More than 1,200 people engaged with the project.
• 4,732 surveys submitted throughout the year.
• Semi-automated score cards for river water quality being developed for use by communities and their data analysis, with the scorecards being implemented across hundreds of water bodies on a six monthly basis.
• The scorecard system provides an effective and bespoke communication tool for local waterbodies, enabling much more timely reporting of outcomes to the Westcountry Citizen Science Community, and allowing them to track the sate of their waterways with up to date data.
• Westcountry River Guardians workshop held in July 2023, to review scorecards for rating river quality.
• The latest scorecards from data collected in 2023 were released in July 2024 with 154 scorecards being produced, which can be viewed on the online map https://wrt.maps.arcgis.com/apps/instant/attachmentviewer/index.html?appid=d07a6f8382764c0faed87d0652d43df9
• Working in partnership with the Catchment Systems Thinking Cooperative (CaSTCo) led by the national Rivers Trust, the WRT team also developed a suite of resources for regional Catchment Partnerships to begin developing Collaborative Monitoring Plans.
• The first workshop was held for the South Devon Catchment Partnership at Follaton House, Totnes on 31st July 2024, and was attended by sixteen participants from national and regional organisations.