Thames River Watch 2015

This year the Thames River Watch project has been continuing to gather data all along the tidal Thames – to give us a clearer picture about the health of our mighty river – through our fantastic team of citizen science volunteers the project monitors water quality, litter and invasive non-native species. We have had a greater emphasis in 2015 on our litter monitoring – developing and refining our approach to monitoring and getting even more volunteers trained up to carry out litter monitoring. Our developer is putting the finishing touches to our online recording system on Cartograher so we will be launching the updated approach in January. We also partnered with two paddleboarders who paddled the Thames from source to sea – an amazing journey, during which they carried out water quality monitoring all along their route! If you’re interested in getting involved in the project we have lots of training opportunities coming up in 2016, we will also be developing the project in the latter part of next year and are looking at new ways to expand our monitoring – maybe using boats and paddleboards! Also in March 2016 we will be holding our Big Count event – where we will analyse and look at all the data that has been collected in 2015 – keep an eye out for more details on this if you’re interested in knowing just how healthy or unhealthy the Thames really is!