Monitoring stream invertebrates is a great way of keeping a check on that water course's ecological health.
Different invertebrate species are more tolerant of water pollution than others and so working out what numbers of key species are present gives us a window into that river's water quality. The question is how to do this given many hundreds of kilometres of watercourse in the Torridge catchment. The solution is local people.
The Biosphere's Nature Improvement Area therefore organised a training session in invertebrate sampling and identification as part of the National Riverfly Partnership at Hatherleigh on 17th May.
17 volunteers will now become our early warning beacons of declining water quality and during this summer and Autumn they will be providing valuable data to a national database and will notify the Environment Agency when warning trigger levels for water quality are reached.
The local interest in this training was so strong that the NIA and Riverfly have organised a second training session in Hatherleigh on July 12th and already, all the available places are filled.
You can find out more about the Riverfly project here.
Click the thumbnails to open the gallery
Different invertebrate species are more tolerant of water pollution than others and so working out what numbers of key species are present gives us a window into that river's water quality. The question is how to do this given many hundreds of kilometres of watercourse in the Torridge catchment. The solution is local people.
The Biosphere's Nature Improvement Area therefore organised a training session in invertebrate sampling and identification as part of the National Riverfly Partnership at Hatherleigh on 17th May.
17 volunteers will now become our early warning beacons of declining water quality and during this summer and Autumn they will be providing valuable data to a national database and will notify the Environment Agency when warning trigger levels for water quality are reached.
The local interest in this training was so strong that the NIA and Riverfly have organised a second training session in Hatherleigh on July 12th and already, all the available places are filled.
You can find out more about the Riverfly project here.
Click the thumbnails to open the gallery
