Water Quality affects everybody.....

.........in one way or another, as Jack Middleton of the Southwest Rivers Trust told Coastwise members.

The Trust, which has an office at Launceston, but with many staff working from elsewhere, has groups for river management, land management, evidence and engagement, coomunications and marketing and administration.

It is the largest and longest-standing rivers trust in the UK, and the sheer scale of drainage patterns in the region is huge, reflected in the complicated drainage pattern for North Devon (Pictured R, 2nd from Top).

Jack is the Citizen Science and Volunteer Coordinator, and has been with SWRT for only a few months but has been active in getting out and engaging with various organisations.

He outlined what good and bad practice regarding water quality in rural and urban environments might look like (Pictured R, 3rd from Top)

The Citizen Science programme was started 6 years ago, has 400 contributors, but he wants to double that number so additional volunteers are being sought.

The water monitoring programme for volunteers includes equipment to test and measure dissolved solids, phosphate concentration and turbidity, together with guidance on recording relevant visual data at the sampling point, covering appearance and surroundings (Data presentation example Pictured R 4th from Top).

The data is added to a form and returned to the SWRT for including in a database.

Each Citizen Science volunteer monitors a specific location on a monthly basis, and receives the kit of equipment and instructions to carry out the sampling.

You can see Jack's talk on YouTube here..... https://youtu.be/6jaqj-RymZI