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 will share lessons on what they have learned about planning community monitoring in their CastCo Demonstration Catchment. 

Our speakers

Paul Hulme

Paul is Technical Lead for Community Monitoring at The Rivers Trust. He is currently working on the CastCo project with Simon Browning supporting eight Demonstration Catchments across the country, helping them with gathering, visualising and interpreting their citizen science data. Prior to this Paul worked for consultants and the Environment Agency leading catchment management projects, and before that Paul built groundwater models to answer questions related to environmental impact and water supply.

Simon Browning

Simon is Monitoring Technical Lead at The Rivers Trust. He is currently working on the CastCo project as above and also act as a ‘Monitoring Helpdesk’ for the Rives Trusts movement. Prior to this role Paul has worked as Monitoring Lead for the Westcountry Rivers Trust, worked for the Environment Agency in the monitoring R&D section, and with companies selling and installing integrated catchment monitoring systems.

Header image credit: © Chris Sharp | Adobe Stock