Archive
FreshWater Watch, and what lived at this address
This subdomain once hosted materials for FreshWater Watch, the citizen science water monitoring programme run by the environmental charity Earthwatch. Research articles, institutional pages and environmental resources still link here, so each linked page below now carries a sourced page of ours on the same subject. The programme itself is active and belongs to Earthwatch, at freshwaterwatch.org.
Pages kept at this address
- Earthwatch and the FreshWater Watch programme: who runs it and what it has found
- The FreshWater Watch test kit: what is in it and how a reading is taken
- Why fresh water is a limited resource, in sourced figures
- The Bristol Avon WaterBlitz: what volunteers measured, 2016 to 2022
- The VattenFokus Blitz: citizen water testing in Sörmland, Sweden, 2017 and 2018
- The Luxembourg WaterBlitz: what citizens measured in 2019 and 2021
- The percentage of water in the body by age and sex, from the studies
What FreshWater Watch does
FreshWater Watch trains volunteers to sample the rivers, lakes, ponds and streams near them with simple standardised kits: colour-change tests for nitrate and phosphate, a turbidity tube for clarity, and structured observations of the surroundings. Thousands of small measurements add up to a picture of freshwater health at a scale professional monitoring alone cannot reach, and the results support peer-reviewed research and national water quality reporting; the figures are on our page about Earthwatch and FreshWater Watch.
What citizen monitoring teaches a household
The programme's idea, that you learn what is in water by measuring it, applies one tap further downstream. On a private well nobody monitors your drinking water but you: EPA advises testing every year for coliform bacteria and nitrate. On a public supply, your utility publishes an annual water quality report. The guides for that are on our main site: whether your tap water is safe to drink, testing well water and water testing services compared.