Purpose
- provide a general baseline of river health
- indicate potential pollution hotspots
- identify opportunities for restoration or improvement
- act as a ‘rallying cause’ for communities
- early warning of big changes to river health
- target investigations and/or higher tiers of monitoring
Characteristics
- standardised approach, widely applied over the long term
- examining a wide range of ecosystem health indicators at entry level
- likely to include large numbers of volunteers and relatively high spatial density of sampling / survey locations
- therefore likely to be relatively low cost / easy to use techniques
- likely to include ‘light touch’ training (online and/or peer-to-peer)
- sampling points chosen to be representative of overall catchment conditions (i.e. not unduly influenced by point source pollution)
- sampling effort should be distributed evenly over the year with regular sampling interval (e.g. weekly, fortnightly or monthly for water sampling)
- data suitable for reporting via standardised ‘report cards’ enabling easy comparison between locations and/or over time
Examples
- Westcountry CSI – a suite of Tier 1 methods + holistic visual assessment
- Water Rangers – structured, co-ordinated sampling using standard suite of equipment (Tier 1)