Simon Browning and Paul Hulme
March 2025

Planning citizen science monitoring of rivers

Photo of the river Severn from above

The CastCo Catchment Systems Thinking Cooperative (CastCo project) is building a shared understanding of monitoring data so that citizen scientists can work alongside professionals to restore rivers together. They have been working with eight Demonstration Catchments for the last two and a half years, where volunteer coordinators have built a workforce of volunteers to carry out a programme of community monitoring on their local rivers. Monitoring data sets are valuable and they take time and effort to gather. They can also influence the environmental decisions made about a volunteer group’s local river. It is therefore important to think about what you want to know and what you intend to do when collecting data and designing monitoring programmes.

In this webinar, members of the CastCo project team share lessons on what they have learned about planning community monitoring in their CastCo Demonstration Catchment.

Header image credit: © Chris Sharp | Adobe Stock