FreshWater Watch archive
Earthwatch and the FreshWater Watch programme: who runs it and what it has found
This address: freshwaterwatch.thewaterhub.org once held FreshWater Watch's "About Earthwatch" page, which reports on citizen science still cite. The programme now lives at freshwaterwatch.org; this page is The Water Hub's own, with each figure read again from Earthwatch's pages and the research papers.
FreshWater Watch is a citizen science programme created in 2012 by the environmental charity Earthwatch Europe, in which trained volunteers test rivers, lakes and ponds for nitrate, phosphate and clarity with simple kits and upload the results (Bishop and others, 2025). Its data now runs to tens of thousands of datasets and is used in national water quality reporting in several countries.
Who Earthwatch is
Earthwatch is an environmental charity founded in 1971 (Earthwatch); its European arm, Earthwatch Institute (Europe), is a registered charity in England and Wales, number 1094467, and runs FreshWater Watch (Earthwatch Europe). The figures some reports quote from this address, such as 1,400 field research projects in more than 120 countries, describe Earthwatch as a whole over its history, not FreshWater Watch.
How FreshWater Watch started
From 2012 to 2017 the programme ran in partnership with HSBC, recruiting volunteers from HSBC offices worldwide (Bishop and others, 2025), as part of the HSBC Water Programme, an eight-year, US$150 million partnership with Earthwatch, WaterAid and WWF that launched in 2012 (HSBC Water Programme impact report). That report counts more than 8,000 HSBC employees trained as Citizen Science Leaders across 36 cities. In 2015 the programme opened as a global project anyone could join (the FreshWater Watch methods manual, archived).
How big it is
The counts depend on who is counting and when, so the table gives each source's own figure. The published study of the 2013 to 2023 data used 29,252 datasets collected between April 2013 and November 2023, with the materials translated into more than 20 languages and used by more than 16,000 volunteers (Bishop and others, 2025).
| Measure | Figure | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Datasets | 80,000+ | freshwaterwatch.org |
| Citizen scientists | 22,000+ | freshwaterwatch.org |
| Datasets | 70,000 | earthwatch.org.uk |
| Citizen scientists | 30,000 | earthwatch.org.uk |
| Water bodies | 2,460 | earthwatch.org.uk |
| Datasets, April 2013 to November 2023 | 29,252 | Bishop and others, 2025 |
| Countries in the data | 40+ on six continents | Earthwatch, 2019 |
What the data shows, and who uses it
Across the water bodies surveyed, 30% showed evidence of nitrate pollution, above 2 mg/L as nitrogen, and 25% of phosphate pollution (Bishop and others, 2025). Nitrate and phosphate are two of the five core parameters of the UN's SDG indicator 6.3.2 on ambient water quality, and a study in England and Zambia found 31 water bodies whose only nitrate and phosphate data came from citizen science (Bishop and others, 2020). FreshWater Watch data is accepted by national agencies for monitoring in Zambia, Sierra Leone, Tanzania and Kenya, most recently for SDG reporting, and a UNEP-funded pilot from 2022 extended it in Zambia, Tanzania, Malawi and Sierra Leone (Earthwatch, 2022).
How good the measurements are
A study comparing volunteers' readings with an accredited laboratory found the electrical conductivity, phosphate and nitrate results in agreement (Earthwatch on Quinlivan and others, 2020), and on the Thames, FreshWater Watch readings complemented the Environment Agency's own monitoring (Hadj-Hammou and others, 2017). The kit and its accuracy are described on our page about the FreshWater Watch test kit.
Next: water testing services compared on The Water Hub.
Questions
Who runs FreshWater Watch?
Earthwatch Europe, the European arm of the environmental charity Earthwatch, which created the programme in 2012.
How many people have taken part in FreshWater Watch?
freshwaterwatch.org counts 22,000+ citizen scientists and 80,000+ datasets; Earthwatch Europe's own page gives 30,000 and 70,000.
Is FreshWater Watch data used officially?
Yes. National agencies in Zambia, Sierra Leone, Tanzania and Kenya accept it for monitoring, most recently for SDG reporting on indicator 6.3.2.
Where is FreshWater Watch now?
At freshwaterwatch.org, run by Earthwatch Europe. This archive page is not part of it.
Sources
- Bishop and others, Citizen Science: Theory and Practice, 2025, read 2026-10-21
- FreshWater Watch methods manual (archived 2022), read 2026-10-21
- HSBC Water Programme impact report (WWF), read 2026-10-21
- FreshWater Watch, read 2026-10-21
- Earthwatch Europe: freshwater, read 2026-10-21
- Bishop and others, Sustainability, 2020, read 2026-10-21
- Earthwatch: new tools and reach, 2022, read 2026-10-21
- Earthwatch Europe: about us, read 2026-10-21
- Earthwatch: overview, read 2026-10-21