Westcountry Rivers Trust

The Trust was founded in 1995 and aims to protect and enhance the West Country's rivers and streams, and to work with the region's landowners, farmers and the wider community, mainly through education projects.

These individuals were particularly motivated to act, having observed a decline in water quality and fish populations in the rivers Taw and Torridge, largely resulting from drought and eutrophication.

Measures to protect rivers could also help to save money for farmers, lower costs for water companies, boost tourism, reduce the need to dredge our estuaries and even benefit human health.

The project targeted strategic catchments in the Westcountry, which supply reservoirs and abstraction points, in a move to significantly improve raw water quality.

As part of Upstream Thinking the Trust ran a reverse auction run on the river Fowey in conjunction with the University or East Anglia (funded by the DEFRA Economics Team).

The projects included: – data assessment and surveying group that is apportioning sediment and phosphate using modelling programmes (SAGIS, SCIMAP, PSYCHIC, ECM, etc.)

The initial pilot sought to address a failure in communication between the wants and needs of the stakeholders across a broad suite of ecosystem services, which historically has resulted in a multitude of sectorally focused management plans that at best do not articulate with, and at worse conflict against, each other.

Each group created a map(s) of the areas important in the provision of the service they were interested derived from a mutually agreed set of rules and assumptions.