Refreshing riverfly

Another chance to practice riverfly monitoring with the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust. A group of us are all booked into the formal course next month, but today was a chance to practice the skills again.

There are two sites which have started formal monitoring along the river frome. Today was time for the monthly read, so we carefully followed the timed procedures for collecting, identifying and analysing the samples.

The kit is standard issue so that results of everyone’s observations are all performed with the same methodology.

The last two months recorded a formal score of 11, and this was repeated again today. That gives some confidence that the process has bedded in, but also, more importantly, that no pollution events have occurred in that stretch over the monitoring period.

I’m paired with Rene when we start to monitoring after the course. One thing we observed today was that it’s difficult to do the identification and counting process with the equipment directly on the ground. So I’ll try and source a lightweight, wallpaper pasting type table that we can set the equipment onto at the sites.