The purpose of water monitoring programs for education and engagement are:
- Awareness: raise the profile of water issues with members of the public
- Education: introduce basic concepts of river and catchment health monitoring
- Engagement: invite people to take part in more formal monitoring schemes
Goals
- Likely to be low-cost and easy-to-use techniques, or visual assessment only
- applied in an ad hoc / informal manner
- training / support materials available at the point of need (i.e. little or no prior knowledge required)
- resultant data is not always analysed. When it is high-level summaries are typical
Best practices
Caveats
Examples
- Big River Watch – unstructured visual assessment – Tier 0 (link to details)
- Freshwater Watch WaterBlitz – unstructured, ‘one-off’ with Tier 1 methods (link to details)