SmartRivers
SmartRivers samples were collected twice a year from 2022 to 2024 at six sites along the River Chess.
SmartRivers is a national citizen science method of analysing water quality by the collection of freshwater invertebrates, run by the organisation Wildfish.
Our Riverfly-trained citizen scientists plus other keen volunteers conducted 3-minute kick samples and a 1-minute hand search, collected all their specimens into a bucket and preseved the samples to send off to taxonomists at Wildfish for identification.
Every specimen within each sample is identified to species level, giving a detailed picture of river health at each site by using species sensitivities to confirm whether environmental pressurs such as flow, sediment or phosphates are considered issues and to what level.
SmartRivers vs Extended Riverfly
Lucy was a Master’s degree Student at Queen Mary University of London, investigating the relationship between the Total Reactive Phosphate Index (TRPI) and data collected from both SmartRivers and Extended Riverfly Monitoring (ARMI) on the River Chess, helping to determine the accuracy of using such methods to quantify phosphate pollution within our chalk streams.
“My fieldwork also looked at other factors, such as river morphology, which may have influenced
macroinvertebrate communities. I also collected my own phosphate readings both in the water and within sediments to compare this with macroinvertebrate data that were collected by citizen scientists in spring 2024.”
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