Join us at 9:30am on Saturday 9th August 2025 at the James Leal Centre in Ray Park for our Citizen Science Water Quality Monitoring Training Course developed through the EMPOWER Rivers Project.

This course specifically focuses on the Roding, Beam and Ingrebourne catchments and their tributaries.

This is a 1-day course, approximately starting at 9.30am and finishing at 4.30pm. The course consists of a morning session inside at 9:30am, followed by a lunch break, a practical session by the river where you will get to practice using some of the water quality monitoring kit, and then a final session back inside.

 Topics covered will include:

• The multiple pressures impacting London's rivers
• The different types of pollution
• The importance of citizen science in monitoring water quality
• The various water quality monitoring methodologies available and their purposes
• The kit we offer and how to use it
• Health and safety protocols
• Where and how to upload your data
• What the impact from your data will be

Getting there: The centre is a 15 minute walk from Woodford Station (Central line), as well as an 8 minute walk from the Ray Lodge Primary School stop (275 Bus). If you are driving, there is a paid car park at the centre costing £5.80 for the day.

Lunch: Please bring your own lunch with you, or there will be time during the break to buy some from the café at the centre.

Clothing: Please dress appropriately for the weather: If there is rain in the forecast, bring a raincoat. In general for riverfly monitoring, please wear long trousers and wear or bring a long-sleeved top/fleece/jumper to protect yourself from nettles or giant hogweed. Please also wear sturdy shoes for the walk to the site for the practical session.

Before signing up, please note that water quality monitoring kit will be given to you at the end of the day for you to then carry out regular monitoring at a location near you in the RBI Catchment (to find out if your area of interest is in this catchment, please click here). This monitoring will be expected to be carried out at least once a month - if you can't stick to this then we may request that you return the equipment to us so we can give it to someone else as we get a lot of requests from people!

More information, including finalised timings, will be sent out to you closer to the date.

If this all sounds good to you, please sign up as soon as possible as places are limited! If you don't manage to get a space on the course, we will be running more sessions so keep an eye out on our Events webpage.

Please do email us at citizenscience@thames21.org.uk if you have any questions!