River Watch Blitz - River Wey Trust & Water Rangers

Every year, the 4th Sunday of September sees community groups take to waterways across the country for World Rivers Day. In Surrey, catchment partnerships such as the Wey Catchment Partnership have created a network of ‘citizen science’ river water testers, who regularly test and monitor different aspects of river health.

Water Rangers, River Wey Trust and ZERO began collaborating three years ago, and in the process have now training up hundreds of Surrey residents as ‘citizen scientists’ to conduct water testing of our local rivers. Saturday  

The partnership has gone from strength to strength and now comprises 10 organisations across the River Wey catchment area, with the shared goals of understanding local river health and helping local residents to become stewards of our rivers. 

On April 17th 2025, Guildford’s Community Water Lab – a project involving all three partners – hosted a ‘water quality blitz’ to celebrate the anniversary of the lab’s launch, and to train new volunteer river testers as part of their twice-yearly training programme.

These Surrey residents go out on a regular basis to take samples along the Wey and Tillingbourne, testing water chemistry such as phosphates and nitrate levels. Passers-by frequently stop to enquire about what they’re up to, and the strong words of encouragement and stories that people share demonstrate the clear love that people have for the waterways in Surrey. 

And rightly so; waterways have always played a vital role across the UK, providing economic benefit, leisure and tourism opportunities, and importantly providing a key habitat for many of our native species. When our rivers are in poor health, nature, the local economy, and our communities can all feel the impact. 

Getting a clear picture of the true state of our rivers is not always easy though, with statistics on the health of waterways across the UK varying significantly depending on the source you find.   

Local testing can therefore play a crucial to understanding the true picture of river health, and that’s one of the major reasons that Water Rangers, an international river testing organisation), and local charities the River Wey Trust and ZERO teamed up to launch a community-led water testing lab that can help create this understanding.  

The Catchment Partnership will be running another session this September, and you can sign up to get free training on how to monitor your local waterways for pollution, at the Community Water Lab.

The community-led water lab launched in April 2024, and is part of the #CaSTCo (Catchment Systems Thinking Cooperative castco.org) projects run by OFWAT. This means Surrey is at the heart of a plan to empower and engage communities looking to restore local river health, as one of seven groups across the UK testing for E. coli in local waterways.

We’ve measured spikes in E.coli in local rivers at 20 times higher than the advisable human swimming levels in England. But you can’t interpret river health from one-off measurements or spikes, so it’s crucial that projects like ours have enough stability to be able to continue operating over an extended period of time to ensure we see genuine trends, rather than relying solely on freak results which may skew the data.

So it was worth us celebrating the one-year anniversary of the lab’s launch! By good fortune, the Great UK Waterblitz by EarthWatch Europe coincided perfectly with the anniversary. We took the opportunity to train another cohort of eager Surrey locals on how to collect data for nutrients (phosphate/nitrates) testing and observational data, and provide them with test kits to go and collect field samples. Our local MP Zoe Franklin even showed up to try her hand at chemistry testing.

Test results gathered by residents in the partnership – who cover most of the Wey catchment – are fed into an open source monitoring platform, as well as Freshwater Watch which analysts across the globe can use to analyse results.

If you’d like to get involved, learn from us, or even donate to help us keep covering the cost of kits, then get in touch with Water Rangers. And remember to sign up for free training this September.