River Monitoring

September 7, 2014

Currently (Sep 2014) I am working on a river monitoring contract for the EPA.

We use macroinvertebrates as indicators of water quality - some are very sensitive to pollution while others can tolerate adverse conditions. Depending on the mix and gather of different species we can tell what has been happening in the river over the past number of months. Most of the species have one year life cycles so if they are knocked out by a pollution incident it takes some time to recover and regroup. Thus, even in September it should be possible to see the impact of pollution such as from a silage effluent discharge, even as far back as in June, because certain key species will be missing from the fauna.