August 2026 Citizen Science update

 CRKC has been assessing our citizen science programme to-date, which has mainly focused so far on evaluating the risk to public health from pollution in the river Kent. We hope to look more closely at evaluating the ecological health of the river going forward, including doing more river fly testing, for example.

Having presented initial results in July to the team of volunteers involved with the Surfers Against Sewage 1-year ecoli testing programme, we are now writing up a report explaining our findings from analysis of the results.

John Soady, CRKC Citizen Science lead has co-authored an academic paper with Isabel – a researcher from University of Sheffield, that has been submitted to the Water Research journal, and is now awaiting peer review.

We hope to meet with Isabel and another academic from Lancaster University to look more closely at the relative impact of pathogens found in this study on both wildlife, as well as humans.