Our Riverfly monitoring programme for the Wotton Brook officially started at the end of September. With a forecast of rain and armed with hand nets and an array of other kit, five of our intrepid Water Guardians set off on a Saturday morning to explore the invertebrate life in our brook. Luckily, the forecast was wrong, the sun shone, and we all had a fascinating and fun morning.
We are part of the national Riverfly monitoring initiative, which is designed to help monitor water quality in rivers and other freshwaters. Riverflies are invertebrates that spend most of their life cycle in freshwater habitats. They are good indicators of water quality because they are sensitive to pollution, and some are more sensitive than others. They’re the ‘canaries of our rivers’. Being low down in the food chain, a drop in their numbers will go on to affect other animals higher in the food chain (fish, birds, and mammals).
The monitoring will be done 3 times a year at 5 sites. This will help us to determine the health of the Brook and identify changes in water quality due to pollution. We’ve had some interesting but variable results so far, so we need more time and more data to interpret them. There’s a lot of other work going on too, and we’ll report more on project progress next month.
Please contact us if you have any questions, observations, or information you think might be useful. Contact: Lympstone Water Quality Group (Clem Davies, Sara Davies, Justin Smallwood, Caroline Lewis, Barry
Lewis, Rebecca Abrahams) sarabragg@aol.com, Tel. 07855 344386; carolinelewis999@gmail.com, Tel. 07792 136638.
