We urgently need to fill gaps in our national evidence base which can help target measures to improve river health. Local communities and citizen scientists are well placed to help fill these gaps, and there are some fantastic examples of this working in practice across the country. However there are few national standards and consistency between local schemes, which makes it difficult to find, access and combine this data with other sources of evidence to inform decisions, or for decision makers to understand whether they can trust the data.

CaSTCo is building the first national framework for integrated monitoring of our river catchments that seeks to tackle the issues around a lack of open collaboration and agreement on how organisations looking after catchments can monitor catchment health, share data and use data to make decisions that  produce the best outcomes for the environment and communities.

We want everyone who cares for and is collecting data on our rivers to be able to see their actions count. To achieve this we need to work together as environmental organisations, water companies, regulators and technical experts to develop an agreed set of standards and protocols for monitoring and data governance which will produce robust data that can easily be integrated with other types of monitoring data, and which can then enable good decisions that produce the best outcomes for the environment and communities.

CaSTCo enables community-gathered data to become genuinely robust. Combining trained citizen scientists with technology on a sufficient scale, and makes analysis of its collective data an incredibly powerful tool. Through sharing, integrating, engaging, training, and collaborating with regulators, communities and decision-makers, we ensure that data is appropriately utilized, adding significant value to decision making, creating more resilient catchments, restoring our rivers, protecting our catchments for nature and all our benefit.