Thames21: EMPOWER Rivers
In the London demo (and beyond!), communities are taking action to improve the health of rivers.
Summary
In the London Demo area, Thames21 is providing training and grants to support small-scale volunteer-led water quality monitoring and river restoration projects. This means London’s network of citizen scientists and volunteer-led River Action Groups will continue to be supported and will be expanded, which will help to achieve the vision of London’s rivers becoming thriving and dynamic systems once more, protected from pollution and teeming with wildlife.
Video: Jack and Philly explaining how Thames21 is supporting citizen science water quality monitoring through the CaSTCo and EMPOWER Rivers Projects (filmed in July 2024)
The context
People are concerned about the health of their local rivers
Many people are concerned about the threats facing their local waterways, like pollution, which causes poor water quality, but they often don’t have the guidance or equipment to do anything about it. The EMPOWER Rivers Community Grant can provide people with the equipment, training and ongoing support they need to become citizen scientists to tackle these threats and improve the health of their local rivers.
Who
- Thames21 – delivering the EMPOWER Rivers Project
- Lund Trust – project funders
- Local residents – ‘Friends of’ groups and interested members of the public not part of groups
- Catchment partnerships – provide general support to project delivery team and citizen scientists (and are often involved in creating bids for the Community Grant and Large Grant)
- Universities like UCL and Imperial – provide technical expertise and research outputs
- Thames Water – provide data that feeds into water quality monitoring strategies
- Environment Agency – provide guidance and data that feed into monitoring strategies
Where
Greater London, but grants will also be awarded to projects outside Greater London if that area is in a river catchment that is at least partly in a London borough.
Groups have embraced the opportunity
More people are out there collecting data
Providing a way to get trustworthy equipment to people, such as Hanna Checkers…
… and Riverfly Monitoring Initiative kit
Providing support to groups when choosing monitoring sites and developing monitoring strategies
Methods
Chemical and physical water quality data
Thames21 has developed a new 1-day training course to give participants the knowledge, skills and equipment they need to gather robust water quality data on their river of interest. After the course, the new citizen scientists will then be able to use:
- Hanna Checkers (ammonia medium range and phosphate low range)
- A device measuring electrical conductivity and temperature (and pH)
- A Secchi tube to measure turbidity
This equipment has been chosen as it provides informative data on a variety of pollution sources, including sewage pollution, road run-off and agricultural run-off.
Biological water quality data
Water quality monitoring can also be done through the Urban Riverfly Monitoring Initiative (RMI) developed by the Riverfly Partnership. Thames21 runs several of these training courses throughout the year.
Qualitative data
It’s also really valuable to observe the environment when carrying out the above surveys and collect data such as air temperature, weather conditions, photos, water colour, water flow and water levels to help figure out the reason behind poor water quality.
£290,000
Available for this Community Grant Scheme to be awarded over the next 5 years (2024-2028)
77
Sites across London are monitored right now. This number is expected to grow significantly as the program grows
550+
Water quality observations recorded in 2024
Data sharing
- Citizen scientists then upload most of this data to Water Rangers, a data collection platform.
- Urban RMI data are uploaded to Cartographer.
There are plans to develop a dashboard to display these different datasets and make it easier to identify problem areas and gaps in monitoring.
Social value
The EMPOWER Rivers Project is impacting people’s well-being in three ways: 1. People feel empowered to act; 2. People feel connected to the people around them; 3. People feel that their actions are contributing to a positive difference in the world.
Environmental benefits
- Water quality monitoring is happening at more sites and more frequently, supporting the monitoring done by the Environment Agency and Thames Water.
- Better understanding of water quality trends and general health of river catchments.
- Better understanding of the success of restoration projects by monitoring them upstream and downstream.
- More eyes on the ground means that pollution issues are found more quickly and hopefully resolved more quickly, too, through collaborative work.
- Productive relationships established between local communities, the Environment Agency, and Thames Water have led to pollution problems being fixed much more effectively.
Project innovation
This project lowers barriers and literally empowers local groups to implement improvements to their local catchments. It also provides upskilling opportunities to local groups because, as well as the water quality training course, a 2-day river restoration course has also been developed. This course enables volunteers to:
- Explore the issues that impact London’s rivers
- Learn how to assess the health of a river
- Find out what river restoration looks like in London
“It’s a really good thing to bring people together to improve nature.”
– Janet Laban, Citizen Scientist and Co-Leader, River Ching Action Group
“I feel that I am contributing in a small way to waterway improvements in my catchment area.”
– John Poole, Citizen Scientist in the Brent Catchment
Supporting material
| Thames21 Project CaSTCo Page |
| Environment Agency’s page on Citizen Science integration |
| Thames Water CaSTCo page (coming soon) |
| From Upstream to Downstream – Hanna Checker sampling – YouTube |