The contribution of citizen science volunteers to river monitoring and management: International and national perspectives and the example of the MoRPh survey

Abstract

The contribution of citizen scientists to worldwide environmental monitoring has increased rapidly, particularly over the last two decades, as initiatives have become increasingly wide ranging in scope and style. River monitoring and assessment faces many challenges, especially over the longer‐term. Difficult decisions are being made over what can be measured and where. Citizen scientists are helping address these challenges by providing information on properties of river ecosystems, in particular biotic and water quality indicators, at lower cost and higher spatial and temporal coverage than would otherwise be possible and by contributing to data interpretation especially through their local knowledge. A notable deficit, however, has been the monitoring of physical characteristics and outcomes of physical interventions. Furthermore, the development of frameworks, such as the catchment partnership approach in the United Kingdom, within which volunteers, non‐governmental organisations, charities, and statutory bodies collaborate to improve understanding of river environments and decision making, is facilitating the engagement needed to support a new generation of integrated citizen science surveys. Within the United Kingdom, citizen scientists use the Modular River Survey to record river habitat data at a range of spatial scales to monitor physical changes and complement biological monitoring, notably the Riverfly Monitoring Initiative and associated “Riverfly Plus” surveys. They also collect geomorphological data and provide data for restoration appraisal. We present and analyse Modular River Survey data to illustrate how such new generation, multiscale, multipurpose monitoring methods can extract maximum value from the ever‐increasing citizen river science approach.

Assessing river condition: A multiscale approach designed for operational application in the context of biodiversity net gain

“…The river condition assessment method incorporates the pre‐existing MoRPh field survey (Gurnell, England, Shuker, & Wharton, 2019; Shuker et al, 2017), which was developed to enable UK citizen scientists to survey physical habitat at a scale that is compatible with biological surveys. Since its launch in 2016, over 500 surveyors have been trained and over 3,000 MoRPh surveys have been undertaken for sites across the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland.…”

“…The river condition assessment method incorporates the pre-existing MoRPh field survey (Gurnell, England, Shuker, & Wharton, 2019;Shuker et al, 2017) MoRPh was designed to be applied to the small (≤30 m wide) single thread river channels that are typical of England. The field survey records the physical and vegetation structural features and human interventions and pressures across the river bed, the channel edgewater margins, the bank faces and the bank tops to a distance of 10 m (Table 1)…”

“…This reflects excess fine sediment supply to the river, particularly from arable agriculture, stock trampling close to river margins, and outfalls (Jarritt & Lawrence, 2007;Owens et al, 2005;Wohl, 2015). MoRPh surveys for some of these subreaches were also used in analyses presented in Gurnell et al, 2019, but in that case the reach-scale properties referred to shorter reaches, resulting in slightly different values for some reach-scale indicators.…”

“…The MoRPh module survey and its aggregation into subreaches (e.g., 5 or 10 contiguous MoRPh surveys) captures many properties that can support geomorphological interpretation within an appropriate spatial hierarchical framework of data gathering (e.g., England & Gurnell, 2016). The compatibility of the river condition assessment with a citizen science survey methodology (Gurnell et al, 2019;Shuker et al, 2017) 6.3 | Potential of the river condition assessment methodology to support other river characterisation, assessment, and management issues…”

Professor Geoffrey Petts (1953–2018): An outstanding interdisciplinary river scientist

“…Keele, Gilvear, Large, Tree, and Boon () take a broader view of river ecosystems, presenting a new method for assessing their ecosystem services. Lastly, recent years have seen the rise of citizen science, and so Gurnell, England, Shuker, and Wharton () review the contribution of citizen science volunteers to river monitoring and management and present a new multi‐scale tool that citizen scientists are applying to characterise the physical and vegetation habitat structure of rivers.…”