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A television crew picked the perfect sunny day for a trip to the Englefield Estate to film an important environmental monitoring exercise on the river Pang.
Riverfly monitoring is used to assess water quality on a stretch of the river which flows through the Estate. The insects living in the river are an excellent measure of the overall health of the waterway. This valuable work has now been filmed by ITV Meridian, the regional news broadcaster for the south and southeast.
The filming puts a spotlight on support for a national citizen science initiative, coordinated by The Riverfly Partnership, in which members of the public regularly collect riverfly data for scientific analysis. At Englefield, the project is undertaken in partnership with the charity Action for the River Kennet (ARK), the Rivers Trust for both the Pang and Kennet catchments.
Volunteers Glyn Horn and Nick Totman joined the Estate’s Education and Environment Officer, Dr Liz Mattison, and Anna Forbes from ARK for the filming.
Dr Mattison said: “Monitoring the health of this beautiful stretch of river is hugely important, to Englefield, the wider landscape and local communities. It was great to be able to showcase the work that ARK and their volunteers are doing to a television audience – and taking part in the filming was a lot of fun.”
Regularly counting the numbers of species such as caddisfly larvae, mayfly larvae, freshwater shrimp and stonefly larvae provides insight into what is going on in the river and can act as an early warning of pollution occurring upstream.
Englefield Estate has a long-term partnership with ARK and also assists the charity with surveys for brown trout spawning, water voles and issues affecting eel migration.
