River health is complex in both its causes and symptoms. A wide variety of factors such as flow, water quality and habitat condition conspire to generate poor (or good) river health. The symptoms can be measured in many ways, ranging from water testing of simple indicators such as conductivity or pH to detailed chemical analysis or studying the assemblage of invertebrates in the river. A basic water sample is inevitably a snapshot in time and gives limited information – like a photo of a person to which people react by saying “you look well”. It can easily mask deeper malaise that would require an MRI scan, or fail to capture an illness (or in the case of rivers a pollution incident) that strikes on the following day.

Official monitoring of the water quality and biology of rivers by regulators is infrequent and sparse. In the past decade or so, cuts to monitoring budgets have led to a reduction in the number of sampling points and the frequency of sampling. At a time when public interest in river health is at its highest in generations, the official data are giving us a very sketchy answer. These inadequate data are fed into models that are used as the basis for making some very big decisions, such as where water company investment should be directed. Given that these are decisions about where we should spend tens of billions of pounds, and on what, surely we should be able to rely on much larger and more accurate datasets? All models are wrong to some extent, but the degree to which they are wrong is largely due to the data that are fed into the model. Rubbish in, rubbish out.

At The Rivers Trust, we have been calling out this problem for the past decade, and three years ago we secured OFWAT innovation funding for a project called CaSTCo (the Catchment Systems Thinking Cooperative) that brought together more than 30 organisations to co-develop a shared framework, principles, and tools for collaborative monitoring, all backed by real-world testing by catchment collaboratives. By aligning citizen science with professional expertise, CaSTCo has been helping communities and decision-makers turn trusted data into healthier rivers in eight demonstration catchments. This highly successful project is coming to an end shortly, and we have set out a roadmap to government to make it business as usual across the country.

As we move towards implementation of water reforms in England and Wales, this feels like the most important foundation stone of the development of a new, integrated water management system. A reliable source of data to give decision-makers the information they need – and the ability to monitor interventions – is fundamental to the successful management of any system, particularly one as complex as water. Government must invest in collaborative monitoring, and they must do so urgently. A few tens of millions would lead to billions being spent more cost-effectively.

This is why The Rivers Trust’s online spring conference on 7th of May – to which all are welcome to attend free of charge – will focus on data for catchment management. Entitled Grounded in Data, it will look at how data can be used to inform decision making and delivery of interventions to build water system resilience and begin to restore our complex river systems back to good health.