Citizen scientists to monitor English rivers in £7m scheme

theguardian.com:

Citizen scientists are being trained as the best hope to protect rivers from pollution and over-abstraction as data suggests the Environment Agency’s new monitoring programme leaves waterways unprotected.

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

Modelled on the testing carried out by volunteers at Chesapeake Bay in the US, the third largest estuary in the world, the project aims to create thousands of volunteer scientists who will monitor their local rivers and provide a grassroots voice to protect them.

“What we want eventually is to have thousands of people volunteering and monitoring their local rivers,” said Simon Browning of the Rivers Trust. “These could be 15-minute surveys or more detailed invertebrate surveys, which give us another level of data. We are trying to formalise the volunteer structure and standardise the monitoring so that we know the data is reliable.

“We want to bring along as many people as possible over all the river catchments across the country, so that by the end of the three years of the project there is no going back, we will see volunteers operating across the country.”

The aim is for the monitoring to be complemented by a network of sensors and the information will be gathered and shared into a central visualisation platform. The project, which is led by the Rivers Trust and United Utilities, is funded via the water regulator Ofwat’s first water breakthrough challenge, and involves academic partners. Browning, who set up a citizen science monitoring project for the Westcountry Rivers Trust which is ongoing, said the Environment Agency testing regime was no longer