Scotland's environment blog

The Riverfly Partnership is a network of organisations working together to protect and conserve the river environment. These organisations represent anglers, conservationists, entomologists, scientists, water course managers and relevant authorities. This UK-wide initiative provides a simple monitoring technique that counts the abundance of freshwater invertebrate animals to detect changes in the quality of river water. Using volunteers, the project helps to expand environmental monitoring capability and can act as a deterrent to would be polluters with the regular presence of regular volunteer sampling. John Clayton, a Senior Ecologist at the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA), tells us more.

Saturday 21 April 2018 was World Fish Migration day, a global event to create awareness of the importance of keeping rivers free from man-made barriers to fish migration. In Scotland, we know of hundreds of man-made barriers that are preventing fish from accessing essential spawning habitat in our rivers. But it’s likely that there are many more out there that we don’t know about. To help us identify where these barrier are, we have developed a barrier recording ‘app' that can be downloaded to a smartphone and used to help us to help the fish. Here you can also find more information about this project and how to get involved.

Scottish weather is often dreich, but never dull. We subconsciously include a daily weather observation in our pleasantries, which is not surprising considering its bearing in all aspects of life and the general mood of the nation. Taking this obsession a step further, there is a long tradition of measuring rainfall by the public. As well as being an interesting hobby, the data is very useful and SEPA is keen to encourage members of the public, schools and businesses to begin rainfall observing to help capture Scotland complex rainfall patterns.

This year sees the fourth national invasive species week, which runs from 23 to 29 March 2018. Many of our partners are involved in tackling and managing invasive non-native species (INNS) in Scotland, and in this blog Jo Long from the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) explain a bit more about this work.

Yesterday was world water day and this year’s theme was “The answer is in nature” – exploring nature-based solutions to water challenges we face such as flooding and water pollution.

At the heart of the new waste data strategy lies partnership working and engaging with those that provide, analyse, communicate and use waste data. And this was evident when over twenty waste practitioners, including representatives from Scottish local authorities and private business, recently gathered to discuss the strategy, how it can be implemented and the future of waste data in Scotland. Gillian Flint from SEPA's Data Unit tells us more.