February 2025
Chuck Willmott from the River Brit (Catchment) Project brings us an update on the state of the river and some of the project’s activities…
After some initial training in 2018, our project started in Loders, Uploders, Askerswell and West Milton. It was then called the River Asker (Catchment) Project.
Initially we covered the eight groups of riverfly but now also cover the 33 groups in the Riverfly Partnership’s Extended Riverfly classification. In 2022 we received Citizen Science Investigation (CSI) kits from the Westcountry Rivers Trust (WRT). Our registered monitors input the resulting data on the Cartographer website, the national database for both the WRT and the Riverfly Partnership.
Clean Rivers of West Dorset (CROWD) was formed in January 2023 and our project has three representatives on it. We also have a coordinator for the various monitoring schemes, and CSI monitors are covering the main rivers and some brooks. We send a copy of our annual report to the Dorset Environmental Record Centre, whose staff add the records of the additional birds and mammals to their database.
This scheme – now called the River Brit (Catchment) Project – has expanded over the last year to include the lower reaches of the River Asker, the Brit and the Simene. It is gratifying to see so many people (24 came to the annual meeting) working together to monitor and continue to improve the state of our rivers.
A wide range of ecological indicators based on the data collected in 2024 confirms the conclusion from previous years that the Asker and Mangerton rivers have a high water quality and support a wide range of invertebrates. The Brit has a somewhat lower quality level and the Simene has a relatively low water quality.
The water vole survey, identifying possible suitable habitat sites, has started in the catchment. I am only aware of water voles in the Asker Meadow Nature Reserve during 2024. Sadly, an adjacent colony was wiped out during the floods early in the year. Mink are also a major threat to the water vole population and we have deployed mink rafts to identify the scale of the problem so we can take suitable steps to eradicate them.
The Brit catchment is also part of a pilot project using natural flood management techniques. It will have 31 monitoring sites collecting data that will be analysed to verify the effectiveness of the different approaches, which can then be used nationally.
A number of volunteers continue to evaluate the health of the Asker and Mangerton rivers for the Riverfly Partnership. These include Janet Robinson and Paul Groom, who collect data at Bradpole Bottom where the River Mangerton meets the Asker.
For more information feel free to drop me an email.
Chuck Willmott
bogle.2@outlook.com