Our Everyone’s Evenlode team is to delighted to announce that a third Citizen Science Water Quality School has signed up to help monitor water quality in the Evenlode catchment area. These three schools are among the first in the country to get involved in the FreshWater Watch monitoring scheme as citizen scientists.
Combe Primary School will be joining Enstone Primary School, and Wychwood Primary School – whose pupils will be completing regular water quality monitoring of the river Evenlode and its tributaries. The schools use the FreshWater Watch app to upload the data they collect to a national database. Pupils will also run their own school assemblies about this work, to ensure they are sharing knowledge with their teachers and peers.
The Everyone’s Evenlode team is working with Evenlode Catchment Partnership colleagues from Earthwatch to provide training for all pupils involved, and their teachers – to ensure safety, and the continuation of the work into the future.
Participation has been led by the pupil eco-committees at each school, which are supported by teachers. In addition to the data collected, another great result of the work is that participating children are already inspiring their friends and family groups to sign up too.
Imagine the younger generations monitoring their own rivers, without relying on a handful of people from the Environment Agency and Thames Water trying to monitor all our waterbodies. This is what the sustainability and legacy of the Everyone’s Evenlode work looks like. This community involvement is vital to building a comprehensive data set about the health of our rivers, and to inspiring future generations to care for waterways and the surrounding wildlife – for the benefit of everyone.