Assessing the Quality of Our Streams
Wildlife Groundswell’s Riverfly group was formed just over a year ago when official tutor Alan Rowland held a one-day training session for 9 volunteer stream monitors. Since then our Riverfly group has been slowly but steadily expanding. Last year there were just two registered Riverfly monitoring sites on the Lizard at Poltesco. Since then we have established many more new sites: four on the lower River Cober at Helston, seven around the Loe Pool SSSI plus sites at Cadgwith, Kennack and the Lestraines River. Even more sites will soon be established at Porthallow, Porthoustock, Carne Creek, Manaccan River, Helford, Frenchmans Creek and the Porthleven Stream. Further afield Wildlife Groundswell Riverfly volunteers are currently researching areas including the lower River Kennall, Bickland Stream in Falmouth, the upper Hayle River and Lamorna with even more expected soon.
Additional training days were recently held in Helston jointly with Cornwall Wildlife Trust for another 28 “citizen-scientist” Riverfly surveyors tutored by Environment Agency’s Iain Barker. These events would not have been possible without very generous financial support from the Goonhilly Windfarm who also funded the purchase of training packs and Riverfly survey kits.
Riverfly surveying of our local streams and rivers is a really effective way to monitor and record changes in the health of our watercourses over time, to identify the scale and sources of pollution and ultimately provide the high quality data needed to hold polluters to account. It’s also an interesting and fun way to spend an afternoon messing around by a river! To find out more please investigate the Riverfly Partnership website or watch this really good 6-minute YouTube video.
If you would like to know more or become actively involved with Riverfly monitoring in west Cornwall please do get in touch – we would love to hear from you!
Riverfly Partnership https://www.riverflies.org/
6-minute Riverfly Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NiPfgNvH5w
