Great UK WaterBlitz

Over a late April weekend citizen scientists around the country set about collecting freshwater samples from their local water courses. CA-WN took part to find out what was involved in contributing to FreshWater Watch’s Great UK WaterBlitz¹.

Twice a year WaterBlitz volunteers sign up to receive a water quality testing kit and commit to spending time to collect their water sample, carry out the tests, observe surrounding nature and submit their findings online.

There are three clearly labelled tubes in the kit, one for testing the quantity of nitrate, one for phosphate and one for assessing the water sample’s pH level - how alkaline or acidic it is. Who knew that pH stands for power of Hydrogen?

Each tube contains a chemical that reacts to sampled water by gradually changing colour. A colour chart is used to gauge the result after carefully defined times; pH at 20 seconds, nitrate level at  3 minutes and phosphate at five minutes.

A photograph and visual site survey complements the water sampling with general details being uploaded online as tick boxes describing the type of water course (ditch, pond, stream, lake, river or canal), nearby land use, bankside vegetation, any floating matter and water colour (from colourless to yellow, brown, green, grey or milky white).

Below, the extract from the live map shows that only a few of West Northamptonshire’s water courses are being sampled. Autumn WaterBlitz runs from 18–21 September 2026. If you know anyone with an interest in the water quality of our drought-prone region do encourage them to register here for further details of how to make a free citizen science contribution.

If there’s enough of us concerned about the quality of the water in our publicly accessible streams, rivers or canals it could be worthwhile setting up our own group to routinely monitor and submit reports. Let us know if that sounds like a worthwhile commitment you would be able to make.

REFERENCE
1 Great UK WaterBlitz