Calling all River Guardians

Calling all River Guardians!

Major funding has enabled ARRT to work in partnership with Sussex Wildlife Trust, Environment Agency (EA), Water companies, and others to enable this exciting project to start in 2024. Public workshops were run last year and testing kits and procedures now well-formulated. Regular monitoring of quality indicators and logging of biodiversity, pollution and other river features is of the essence. This will enable the build-up of data that can be used to underpin higher-level discussions with local Councillors, EA, Natural England and to hold companies and polluting parties to account.

This long-term Citizen Science investigation project is an ideal way for YOU to become involved in the monitoring of the water on a convenient patch of river of your choice.

We're being asked to monitor 5 items alongside the general impression of the flow and state of a local river.

• Phosphates
• Nitrates
• Turbidity
• Total Dissolved Solids
• Temperature

We, and of course all wildlife, depend on clean water as an essential natural resource within a functioning ecosystem.  Water quality has caught media attention, and sadly the Arun catchment is no exception in being sub-standard. 

This SWT Regional Group would like to encourage as many people as possible around Storrington and the Arun Valley to get in touch with Keir Smith (the River Guardian Coordinator), to register yourself and/or your organisation into this water quality project: [email protected].  For H&S you will need to sign up to being an ARRT volunteer https://arrt.org.uk/volunteer/.