An article in the Hereford Times has paid tribute to the over 500 citizen scientists who have been testing the waters of the River Wye for pollution levels over the past few years. By now they have taken something like 50,000 samples!
It started with anglers from the Wye Salmon Association who were concerned about the water quality in the river, and expanded to other groups along the river like Friends of the River Wye and CPRE Herefordshire.
There is now a combined database available to view, created by one of the members of Friends of the River Wye, at WyeViz (the Wye Viz Wye Alliance Citizen Science dashboard). 100,000 people have visited the site so far.
Citizen scientists and their groups are also calling for the government to do more to clean up the river. The main problem along the Wye is agricultural run-off. A recent Welsh Government report (www.gov.wales on Control of Agricultural Pollution) says that only 41% of farmers are compliant with the environmental regulations, and they are visiting farms and sending out warning letters and enforcement notices, but there's still a lot more that could be done, if the funding and staffing levels were better.
The number of citizen scientists involved shows just how much local people love their river - and for every citizen scientist there are more people who love the river but can't get involved in that way.
From the article: "Andrew McRobb from CPRE Herefordshire said: “We started doing this monitoring because the agencies told us that they were lacking data. We’ve delivered data in spades and they need to act on it. Over five years of sterling work by volunteer citizen scientists has delivered evidence for the agencies and governments and led the way to the government funding a long overdue comprehensive Wye Catchment Plan. We can identify the problems, but only the government agencies can enforce the actions necessary to deliver real change”."
No comments:
Post a Comment