Some sad news today.  Some of you may already know but I only found out today that Caradoc Fishery Owner and WUF trustee Major Patrick Darling passed away last week.  Our sincere condolences go out to his family at this sad time.

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Good Morning,

 

Please see below an update from the Environment Agency regarding the River Wye and water quality.

 

Monitoring Sondes 

                

Yesterday we started to remove the 11 sondes that are deployed across the Wye, Arrow, and Lugg catchments to provide continuous water quality monitoring data.

 

This is so the sondes do not become damaged during higher flows as river levels begin to rise over the coming months due to increased rainfall. 

 

This means that our continuous water quality monitoring will stop, and live data will no longer be available.

 

We are please to have secured funding to redeploy the sondes next year and will communicate when we are able to do this.  

 

Quarterly Reports  

 

In January 2022 we published our first River Wye Management Catchment Integrated Data Analysis Report, and have published subsequent reports every three months since. The aim of the reports are to bring data from citizen scientists, monitoring sondes and autosamplers together with existing datasets to contribute to a shared understanding and ownership among stakeholders of the issues and actions required.

 

The reports have been vital in kick-starting actions into motion and we thank those who have read, shared, and provided feedback on the reports.

 

At the June Nutrient Management Board meeting it was agreed that there will be sub-groups of the Technical Advisory Group (TAG) to progress key themes of the Phosphate Action Plan and work collectively with partners and experts to resolve gaps and take opportunities identified.

 

It is expected that this concerted collective effort will see more progress than previous approaches. The TAG ‘evidence sub-group’ is key for everyone's understanding of the possible solutions and their timeliness and effectiveness. We look forward to working with partners in these sub-groups. The Environment Agency is chairing the evidence sub group.

 

As a result, we are now moving to focus more resources on the evidence sub-group to continue improving collaboration so we will be publishing our integrated data analysis reports every six months instead of three months, with the next report due in the new year.

 

We have received positive feedback on the value of our Integrated Data Analysis Reports, and are pleased to hear they have been useful for everyone's common understanding of the problems and what the data is showing us. We will continue to complete the reports, improve them, include more data where appropriate and feed them into the collaborative work in the catchment.

 

Citizen Space Webpage   

  

We have updated our dedicated Citizen Space webpage reflecting the latest information detailed above.  

  

Please share this email with your contacts and signpost people to our webpage. We aim to improve the content of our information overtime and welcome your feedback.

 

Kind regards

Nathan

 

Nathan Harrison | Engagement Specialist – River Wye Water Quality | West Midlands
Environment Agency | Sentinel House, 9 Wellington Crescent, Lichfield, WS13 8RR

For further information please contact the Customers & Engagement Team:

Tel: 02030 251583 | Email: engagement_westmids@environment-agency.gov.uk