‘Teacher Workshop: Investigating the River Chess’

Great um as as I said my name is Kerry I work as an education officer for for the children’s chalk streams project um the projects if we move on to the next one just a welcome the Project’s been running for around 26 years now and we

Cover we deliver work on the nine major chalk streams that rise in the Chilton Hills so we work from the little U Brook down in Oxfordshire all the way up to the river fur that flows through St Albans and and all in between and so although these resources are

Focused on River chest we do quite a lot of work on other rivers as well and some of the resources will be relevant to others so if some of you are located closer to some of those other rivers or do your field work on them a lot the the

Information that we’re giving you will be relevant um if we can have a look at the next one please as just say the Project’s been running for um just over 26 years now it is a partnership project so it was initiated after years of low flow in the 1990s particularly on

Misbourne and the river chess um and it was a way to try bring together the major players to to try and track tackle some of the problems that these rivers are facing it’s led by the children’s conservation board but you can see the list of logos it includes the water

Companies the environment agencies um and other local voluntary groups as well as bug Council we deliver quite a range of work as part of the project so education is one strand of what we do um and we try to deliver education in the broader sense so we have various programs that

Are looking more at working with Community groups and and public engagement and events um as well as our school education program we’re quite involved in Access and uh right way on the different walks and trying to promote people visiting the visiting the rivers and learning more about the rivers through direct

Contact uh we provided an advisory service to land owners who have the rivers that flow through the land and also to people that are managing land in the river catchments where that Land Management is having an impact um and we deliver various River restoration and conservation projects on the the nine

Different rivers that we work on um I just wanted to sort of let you know who we were because we we possibly haven’t heard of the project before a lot of the education work that we actually deliver on the ground is is primary based but quite a few of our resources are

Secondary based we’re not delivering a lot of secondary field work because we’re very aware that there’s already quite a lot of fieldwork taking place and lots of schools are quite confident and capable of leading fieldwork activities themselves and there’s also a field studies Council Center based in the CHS um that’s delivering fieldwork

As part of their their char blims so we we’re not doing lots of work on secondary field work delivery we are trying to produce good resources to support the work that you’re all doing um and we’re also interested in providing things that you need and that other other providers

Perhaps aren’t doing so we are offering kind of we we’re delivering bespoke things in some secondary schools and colleges um so yeah again it’s it’s kind of speak to us about what you need and what you’re not able to access in other ways um because we can provide speakers

We can provide other workshops if if that’s something that you need thank you um and the other thing I just wanted to to flag up Kate will mainly be speaking this evening about the the education resources and the learning section of our website there is an awful

Lot of other relevant information on the website so our website is children stream.org um and although there are particular things we flagged as learning resources in the learning section there are other things that might be useful as secondary information for work that you’re doing um so particularly work on

Some of the threats that chalk streams face some of the pressures that they’re under in in the chalk streams and crisis section um and also in the hour work section of the website we try to keep up to date case studies of projects that we’re delivering so if you um are

Interested in case studies of river restoration or other activities that are going on to improve these Rivers um then that that section is worth a look as well so I just you would if you if you’re able to and if you have time um encourage you to have a look at the

Wider wider website Beyond The Learning section um I won’t talk anymore about the background because I think everyone’s interested in in the the education side and the learning resources that we have so I’ll hand over to Kate now um to talk you through that thank you thanks

Krie um really happy for people to uh interrupt me as I work through these slides so please do ask questions and turn on your microphone if you want to to to ask a question um I think probably better to do that than wait till the

Very end or put question in the chat if you want because kri will pick up on those and hopefully then stop me in my flow as well and get we’ll get your questions answered um so we’re going to kind of split this up into two parts um

We’re going to start with me giving you an introduction to chalk streams in a wider sense and the importance of chalk streams um and then move on to have a break and then move on to the kind of material that we’ve developed and put on the web uh to help

You uh teaching about different aspects of chalk streams and with a kind of focus on geography on biological science and um on um sort of linking those as well within the curriculum so again I do ask questions at all all points when I’m talking um but I’m going to just start

Off with these two two photographs both of the river chess um and one is a lovely photograph on the left hand side showing the river chess as we hope it looks most of the time you can see some of the important characteristics of a CH extreme in this

Photograph um for example you should be able to see under the water the submerged plant that’s a ronculus which is a long trailing aquatic plant which is really characteristic of chalk stream environments it’s one thing that makes these chalk streams so special are the plants that grow in these rivers and you

Can just about see the white flowers uh on top of the water there which are part of the the ronculus so chalk streams generally are characterized by clear water and that’s because they’re groundwater fed systems and we’ll go into a little bit about how the systems are fed by

Groundw and what that means and the types of characteristics it gives these these streams but one thing to think about is the kind of um High ecological status of these Rivers as a result they’re very productive systems they have lots of plants growing in them and around them lots of fish and

Invertebrate species as well now unfortunately a lot of our chalk streams are not in good ecological status as you you’ll see further on in this presentation um and often we see the river chess uh like it is on the right hand side so this is where um we’ve had an extended period of

Rainfall which has washed fine sediments so clay material and silty material from the road systems from the uh fields surrounding the chess into the river um and the river has become what I would call turbid or very cloudy um so when we started working on the chess we were

Very interested in um sources of pollution to the chess and this is one example of a photograph where the river is receiving lots of urban runoff lots of Road runoff and that’s turned the water from the sort of clear transparent water you see on the left hand side to

Very to very cloudy on the right so again that’s an aspect I’ll I’ll be talking about uh as we move through the slides so what are we aiming to do with this Workshop um we’d like to introduce you to some of the challenges that are faced by river managers in the changing

World so we have a team at the Chilton chalk streams project who are out there looking after the rivers um in the Chon um and are coming up against sort of daily CH challenges in terms of the river water quality so the quality of the water the chemistry of the water and

Quantity so the flows in the river as well so when I’m talking about one water quantity I’m talking about the amount of flow in the river and the timing of that flow when I’m talking about water quality I’m talking about the chemicals in the river system and that includes

Things like fine sediment moving through the river as well we want to provide you with some material to enable you to um teach about the water cycle and Water Management from a kind of chalk streams perspective so I’ll take you through some of that material introduce you to the

Educational resources that we have on the on the website um and sign post to use some potential learning activities and I’m really interested in your feedback as well as I’m going through things if there are questions want to ask about learning material or S make suggestions as to what we could make

Available or improve we’d be really interested in hearing from you so please don’t hold back um in terms of your of your comments um one thing we’ll focus on a little bit in the second half of the talk is inquiry based learning material um and we think good inquiry based

Learning has four different characteristics that are really important so one is that the learning is is driven by questions it encourages students to to have a a questioning attitude towards knowledge so what we’ve provided is some what we call stimulus material material are just talking

Points for students to to have a look at and think about questions that arise from the material we provided we’ve based it around the geography um curriculum so it’s um the material is a kind of blend of human geography and physical geography so some things are about issues associated with

The river and others are more we’ve got more material that’s also sort of mathematically based you know opportunities to do statistical analysis on data for example as well um and an inquiry good inquiry based learning means that students are making sense of the information for themselves to develop their understanding so we’ve

Created some story Maps some material that students can use to explore issues on the river chess as well and they can reflect on their learning so those are the elements we would consider to be uh good inquiry based learning characteristics so I wanted to start

With a couple of um diagrams for you and I’ve tried to Source diagrams from um websites that would be easily accessible um so for example here we have um a water cycle as drawn by Affinity water so this is a local water company that operate in the chest catchment um and

You can see here um we’ve got a kind of traditional natural water cycle diagram on the left hand side um and then on the right hand side you’ve got the water treatment cycle as a water company might see it and something that I find is sort of less understood when we talk about

Rivers because we often Focus uh in hydrology on the natural water cycle so just running through that natural water cycle um for the starting point we’ve got um obviously water evaporating from Open Water bodies so evaporating from the sea from River water surfaces and from Lakes so water evaporating into the

Atmosphere and also transpiring from from the leaves of plants from trees Etc that’s all moving water into the atmosphere and then that water falls as rain or sleet snow or hail onto the ground um and then makes its way back into our river systems and back out into

The sea now in terms of thinking about Chalk streams and other types of catchments across the UK one of the critical characteristics is how permeable the soils and the rocks are on on the land so in a catchment like the chess’s catchment which is underlain by chalk

The soils that have developed above that chalk are quite permeable it’s very easy to for water to move through those soils so when it rains on the soil surface a good proportion of that water moves down through the soil down into the permeable Rock and into the aquifer and then makes

Its way back up into the river again from the ground and we can contrast that with a a catchment that might be more clay soil for example where a lot of the water won’t be able to perme permeate through into the soil or infiltrate into the soil and will actually travel across the

Surface the land surface into the river so there’s some even around closer areas to us around London there’s quite a difference in the hydrology of different catchments depending on the soil type so as a student looking at the soil type and relating that to the hydrological cycle is really quite

Important on the right we have the water treatment cycle and all of our rivers in the UK H have had human lots of human activity the chess is uh no exception to that there is um a sewage treatment works at the upper end of the chess just

Downstream of chesham that has a sewage treatment works of um 38,000 population equivalent um which means it’s a large s treatment works and at times uh in summer drought conditions the water from that seage treatment works can be 80% of the flow through the chess so the chess

Is highly modified in terms of the amount of treated effluent that’s moving through it it’s quite an extreme weather River from that P perspective there’s not that many other rivers in the country that have this proportion of treated effluent moving through them it’s at the sort of upper end um but

When you look at rivers around the country most of them will have sewage treatment works on them um and um part of the sort of water treatment cycle will be occurring within the catchment so we can look at this from two perspectives um we can start

With the fact that um in some river systems and not in the chest not in chalk streams there’s abstraction actually from the river itself so for example in the temps Downstream of the chess you’d see abstraction points uh where water is taken from the river for drinking water

Supply in the chess catchment we have abstraction from aquifers so the water’s being abstracted from The Rock um underneath our feet in the river chest catchment from the chalk uh that water makes its way to uh drinking water treatment plant and then is provided to our homes for our domestic drinking water

Supply and those of you who know the chess well will know that there’s for example a drinking water production site down at chollywood near chollywood House estate um so you can see um that if you were thinking about the water cycle we use that water in our

Homes and the water then goes to our down to our drains and to a sewage treatment works um and then it flows back when it’s been treated into the river system So within the river chess we have two sewage treatment works one just Downstream of chesham at the top end of

The river and then there’s one in the middle section of the river at chenes as well which is much smaller than the um the seage treatment works at chesham so this water treatment cycle is really important for for our UK rivers and important for students to understand

The importance of that of that water treatment cycle are there any questions about about this so far that anyone wants to pose so I mentioned groundwater earlier on so really important to understand these types of groundwater flows and I like to think about them as big sort of Loops of water

Underground so this uh diagram bottom right shows you these Pathways of water essentially you’ve got rain falling on the soil surface that rain moves down through the soil infiltrates through the soil surface and then permeates down into the aquifer and then it goes in a big loop back up to surface water again

And up to the river system and groundwater flows they occur throughout the Landscapes from mountain ranges through to the oceans you can think of them as nested Loops of water flows all with different travel times so for example if the water flows uh water infiltrates very close to the river

System it might take days for water to move uh through the shallow soil in into the river uh if it’s a bit further back from the river system it might take um weeks to months to move down through the into the groundwater and then back out

Into the river um and then these Loops get progressively bigger and bigger um the deeper the water actually moves so flow Pathways can be tens of meters in length to tens of miles in length so that means they have different travel times uh days to Millennia so in the

Chess um in terms of the groundwater contribution to the flow we know that on average that’s taken 50 years to go from the soil surface down into the ground into the aquifer and then back up into the river again so that what we would call the residence time of water is 50

Years and that’s just an average because in reality there are lots of these different Loops going on of different lengths and different travel times but really important when we think about water chemistry because it means what we see in the River today may have been applied to the land about 50 years ago

For example so the nitrate that we see in the river nitrate concentrations reflect what we were doing in terms of farming practice about 50 years ago on average so you change that farming practice and change that those activities on the land surface it may take quite a while for you to see an

Effect in the river system okay is there any any questions that anyone wants to ask in relation to that because that’s quite an important concept for um groundwater fed Rivers such as the chess sorry K there’s one question that came up um just based on the last slide I’m asking does the

Involvement of treatment works affect water quality in the river itself yes so it does um so the the water as you know the sewage is treated so it’s treated effluent that is entering the river system but it does have a higher concentration of of dissolved chemicals in it

So U what I’ll show you later on a thing called electrical conductivity which measures the total um electrical signal from the water and that is generally higher Downstream of the sewage treatment works compared to Upstream because there are more chemicals for example there be more salt slightly more

Salt in the river system also temperature so on average ass treatment works can increase temperature in a river by one degree so we’ll see in the chess again there there is Downstream differences in temperature rise ing from the the sewage treatment works and that’s one the size of the the CH the

Chesham sewage treatment works for example so with a population of sort of tens of thousands of people contributing to that seage treatment works okay so we’ve talked a bit about groundwater um there are lots of different aquafer types in the UK and aquafer is basically a permeable rock

That stores groundwater and it allows water to flow L into a bore hole or a well now these rocks themselves have to have quite high paracity so lots of pore space in them which is filled with water so the pores are big enough to collect water within them but the pores also

Have to be well connected so that water can actually flow through the aquifer and Chalk’s quite interesting because the reason that the um it’s a good um rock to draw water from is actually because of all the cracks and the fishes in it as opposed to the it’s storing the

Water in The Matrix of the chalk so sometimes the water that’s stored within the chalk Matrix is is disconnected from the rest of the water supply and it’s actually that when you pump a bore hole from the aquifer you’re pulling water from all the small fractures and cracks

Within the rock so we call it a dual paracity either I.E a two paracity system it has these fra these fractures and these fishes where you can actually get quite rapid water movement and then you have the rest of the chalk Matrix which actually is quite slow water

Moving and it makes it quite difficult to predict where the water’s coming from within the aquifer because it’s all about where these um fractures and Fishes actually move within the rock most groundwater circulates in the upper 100 to 200 Metter uh from the surface of the saturated zone so

Essentially you’ve got groundwater sort of from the soil to 100 to 200 M depth in these aquifers and the aquifers that we have in the UK the main ones are chore there’s permo trasc Sandstone which is that sort of lighter orange color on that Map There’s the brown color um

Which is are sort of Carboniferous and older cover um but there’s also Jurassic Limestone and lower green sand as well which actually when you see it is proper bright green sand looks it’s quite impressive when you when you dig that up um and we’re in the chalk area so we’re

To the north there of the London Basin in this um area of green chalk so groundwater’s really important for public water supply in England and Wales IT Supplies 30% of our public water supply that’s 6,064 megaliters each day and that’s enough to run a dishwasher 400 million times every day

So that’s a lot of water that we that we use it’s a really critical supply of water for our domestic use for agriculture and for industry as well um and I’ve put this map on the right here as well because that shows you the different uh aquifers in the UK and how

Productive they are I.E how water bearing they are how um efficient they are at bearing water for public water drinking Supply and you can see this dark blue band here the CH the chalk is really highly productive we use it um for domestic water supply so in the

Chest catchment for example all our water is coming from um the aquifer in the area unless it’s pumped in from external and the water companies recently have been shutting down abstraction within the ch catchment and starting to draw water from um areas external to the catchment but up that’s

Only been happening in the last few years so previously we were drawing water from around chesham from the aquafer below chesham and from around the chollywood area for our drinking water supply I just wanted to show you a few diagrams that nicely illustrate what happens when we pump water from a B hole

If that b hole is close to a river system because it makes us think about um the effect of the drinking water supply potentially on the river system so the top one a here shows you um the land surface the top of the groundwater that’s the water table on that diagram

And you can see these um arrows showing you the travel the flow of the water um so essentially you’ve got uh arrows moving down through the soil to the aquifer hitting what’s called a confining bed so that will be a layer of the aquafer that’s less permeable might

Be clay for example rather than chalk so the water can’t move through that so it starts to move sideways and move then moves through um into the stream Carrie can you see my um cursor by the way on this y Okay cool so basically your your water is moving um firstly um laterally

Sorry firstly vertically and then laterally into the stream now if you put a bore hole um in the flood plane area or on the lower slopes of a hill slope and that would be a common thing to do because you want the water table to be

Fairly close to the surface um you are going to start pumping water out of this bore hole and you change these flow lines so you start to um move the flow lines to the bore hole and you create what’s called a water divide here where

Of the water is going to the stream but it may be that some of the water is actually going to your bore hole instead of the stream and so under this kind of scenario we’re taking water for public drinking water supply and perhaps it’s not reaching the stream and this is why

We see um examples of what we would call over abstraction in some of our catchments where we’re taking uh lots of water at the expense of the actual river system which the flows in the river system then start to reduce if we pump pum um extensively from that ball hole that’s near the

Stream then eventually we may actually be creating um lines of transmission straight from that River so even the river water is then moving into the bore hole this is obviously something that the water companies don’t want because if they do this then the quality of that

Water isn’t going to be as good so they want to be collecting water from the aquafer because it’s much cleaner the the action of that water moving through the soil has cleaned it and removed some of the contaminants from it there any questions in relation to

That Carri that appearing in the chat at all good if anyone wants to ask just uh far away if there’s any questions okay so what’s so important about uh chalk streams um there’s they these are groundwater fed Rivers there greater than 200 of them in England um and the

Water in these groundwater fed Rivers is predominantly from these chalk aquifers so it has the characteristics of the chalk because that CH as the waters move through the chalk it’s it’s picked up lots of chemicals so for example chalk is made of calcium and magnesium carbonate so there’s lots of calcium and

Magnesium in this water it’s rich in those solutes um and those are micronutrients for these plants they’re part of the reason why there’s such prolific growth of plants in these river systems because they’re using the the using the Magnesium using some of these solutes for plant growth um because that water’s been

Filtered as it’s moved through the soil um and it comes out of that that groundwater out of the chalk quite clear so that’s why the water that you see flowing in groundwater-fed rivers is very clear and not very turbid because it’s coming up through Springs in the

Ground into that river system and coming up through the riverbed as well um so we get what’s clear alkaline because it’s got lots of calcium and magnesium carbonate in it and mineral lots of minerals from The Rock So mineral Rich water and this leads to it being an ecologically Rich highly biodiverse

System with lots of instream plants supporting fish like trout that you can see bottom right and kri I suspect this is a picture from your trout in the classroom initiative um and mammals like water Vall water vs love this type of habitat that you can see on the left here with the Reed

That’s a lovely habitat for a water ball to live in uh to get its food from um and to to create its nests in as well these are internationally important river systems England has 85% of the world’s chalk streams there’s also Chalk in France and there’s Chalk in Denmark

As well so there are Danish chalk streams and French chalk streams but we have the Lion Share of them um and so they’re iconic systems and often when people think about spending time by Rivers they’re thinking about clear water systems with lots of plants and and these types of animals in the

System so where are they well you’ve already probably guessed that they’re obviously in this area of chalk to the north and to the south of London it runs from um actually there’s there’s chalk streams up in Yorkshire um and then there’s lots in East Anglia and in a

Band moving just to the north of London and across down to Dorset as well and down to the river uh P which I love the name of and the river FR as well down here in the southwest here now this um diagram on the right though is colorcoded to show you the ecological

Status of these different chalk streams and you can see a lot of them here are red and orange rather than green and this means Unfortunately they are not at what we would call good ecological status so the good ecological status streams are in green moderate is

Orange and bad to poor are the red color here and the environment agency who are The Regulators um of our rivers in the UK um do this uh ecological status analysis uh every five years um and they look at all of the data that they have on these Rivers they look at their

Chemical status and their ecological status and then they grade them overall and this is the grading that they they get as part of what we call the water framework directive so you can see that there is um quite a problem in terms of eological ecological status with many of

Our chalk streams and those in the chilon including the chess um are red and orange on this map and are not a good ecological status and I’ll take you through some of the reasons uh for that in a moment this is um an image from Affinity Waters website with their um pictorial

Schematic of a hydrological cycle in a chalk catchment and you can see here they have their water pumping station they explain that water’s being pumped from the aquifer to be treated they talk about infiltration so water falling in onto the land soaking into the soil moving down into the

Aquifer whereby it’s it’s either going through the soil and then into the aquifer or it’s also then being taken up by plant roots to be transpired back out into the atmosphere again the thing that I don’t like about this diagram that it doesn’t show the relationship between

This River and the chalk aquafer it doesn’t show you that the water table should be at a height that’s equal to the bed of the river system these rivers flow when the water table is above the height of the bed of the river because they’re being fed from the groundwater

And this diagram rather disconnects the River from the chalk aquifer so so um just be careful when you’re choosing your different diagrams out there in in the environment and thinking about Chalk streams the best diagrams link and show really clearly show that link between ground where the groundwater is and

Where the river is as well so we have developed some of those kind of plots for our um story map that I’ll show you later on I just wanted to show you some hydrological data for uh chalk stream for the chest just to give you an idea

Of the difference between um a river on Chalk and a river on on Clay which I mentioned earlier on so these are um plots that you can download from um the river National River flow archive which is all online and for all rivers in the UK you can take this data it’s

Environment agency gauging data and you can download these types of graphs so this is I’ve just chosen um a graph for the chess on the left and a graph for the river Lee on the right and this happens to be the 2016 but you can choose whatever year you want

Um you’ve got month on the bottom on the x-axis and you’ve got flow in qex um on the y axis here so that’s uh you might call that discharge rather than flow um and so you’ve got a a line that black line just shows you the flow um at

Different times of the year and this is through 2016 and we can compare that to a nearby River the river Lee in North London which has a clay catchment and I’m sure you can see here that the the chess hydrograph is much more subdued far less

Noisy far less peaky than the Lee and that’s because the Lee is as I said it’s Clay um that Clay is not permeable so the water that flows onto that catchment when it rains it tends to flow across the surface it can’t infiltrate through the soil um and so we get really rapid

Runoff from the catchment surfaces into the river Lee whereas on the chest we’ve got this subdued hydrograph much more more stable because um that movement of water into the groundwater is buffering that river system it takes time for the water to get into the river now you’ll always see though some rapid water

Movement so when it rains in the chest as you’ve probably if any of you are I think quite a few of you here may well be quite local you see River the roads running with water for example and they’re fairly well connected in some places to the chest so you’re always

Going to get some water moving into the river quite immediately in an urban setting um but a large proportion of water falling on the catchment is actually moving down into the chalk before it reaches the the river um are there more questions in the chat Carrie that I need

To so no nothing’s popped up at the moment no I have just shared the um the the website for the data perfect yeah is anyone want to ask any questions about about that I think it’s a nice sort of visual look at um the hydrographs associated with different soil

Types okay so the national River flow archive um show can show you um lots of different hydrological information from the UK and I think it’s a really useful resource to um explore so I’m going to try and explore that with you now and just show you if my screen share will

Move out of the way which is not going to do sorry I just can’t get to the tabs underneath this right let’s stop sharing for a moment and then I will get to the UK Water Resource portal and then I’ll start sharing again okay so you should see the UK Water Resources portal

Now so this is the homepage um when you first head in there and you can just zoom in on any river that you would like so we can try and zoom in on the chess we can have a look here um Rivers like the gate for example and here we go

Down to the river flow St the Chess at rickmansworth you just click on the chess on the gauging station and then on the right will pop up the actual flow for the chess including some very recent information so this has been up updated as of January the 20th here you can see

2024 so a couple of days ago I suspect that hydrograph will be rising um after last uh night’s rain um and it gives you some really nice banding for the for the river so this is from a gauging station that measures discharge down at rickmansworth um which is run by the environment

Agency and you can see this different banding tells you uh how the flow is at the moment in relation to long-term records so if the flow is up in the blue for example that means it’s above normal or notably high or exceptionally high if it’s in the down into the red we’re in

Years where the flow is below normal or notably lower exceptionally low so you can change the number of years you’re viewing the data over just by clicking on this number of years thing and for example here for the chess you can see that in 2020 2021 we had exceptionally High to notably High

Flows within the river chess so groundwater levels were very high and flows in the river were very high as a result so this is a really nice resource that you can use with students and you can uh very easily um click on these icons to download plots as uh pngs you

Can explore um different forms of the graph as well and download the data so nice site to to to have a lookout and use further right I’ll stop sharing again and then get us back to the um presentation okay so that’s the site that I think um

K’s put in the chat for you so that you can access that afterwards said there’s lots of pressures on Chalk streams um the flows and the water quality are under increasing pressure from abstraction for drinking water purposes although as I’ve said recently the water companies have stopped abstracting for

Drinking water in the area and increasingly um are taking supplies from elsewhere and moving them into the catchment so we have one bore hole that’s still active but there are others that have been um temporarily shut shut down so that’s starting to be addressed in the chess got agricultural activities

So there’s agricultural runoff that causes issues for the river as well um Urban runoff lots of Road runoff for example during the kind of weather that we’ve seen um over the last few days um and sewage inputs as well to the river system so um not just treated effluent

But untreated effluent as well when either there’s been high intensity rainfall or when groundwater levels are particularly high in the river chess so it reflects a lot of the issues that we’re seeing and hearing about more widely across the UK just got a little um table here and

You can download this from our 25e report of the Chon chalk ex streams project um but this just shows us the state of different uh streams in the chilon and you can see that the chess here is a moderate ecological status you can see that all Rivers failed for

Chemicals um and that’s uh similar to most rivers in the UK okay because of what we call um these very longlasting chemicals you might have heard them being called Forever chemicals chemicals that don’t degrade organic uh pollutants like um brominated uh flame retardants for example pbdes um and the other chemicals these

Posos are fluorinated compounds as well that we use around the home as well these types of chemicals unfortunately made their way into our Rivers for various different reasons and are the reasons why a lot of our Rivers fail for chemical status um and our chalk streams are no

Different from a lot of the other rivers in the UK for that reason um so yes so the chess is not a bad ecological status in fact it’s one of the better ones in the in the Chon’s area um but it does have a problem with phosphate um and the seage treatment

Works at chesham at the moment is putting in what’s called phosphorus stripping to try and remove the phosphorus because the phosphorus levels in the chest at the moment are quite high oh there more questions in the chat just one popped up just um trying to understand the the relationship between

Groundwater flow and and runoff um so question you said earlier that residence time is 50 years um but the chest obviously reacts to recent rainfall in terms of Greater discharge obviously if you see the river after a storm so the discharge is a combination of both then

Yes it is and so you’ve got a lot of paved areas around chesham for example lots of streets so the the water from those from falling on those roads is entering the river quite rapidly um also you’ll have water entering the river that’s um just going through the soils

So through the shallow soils and then moving into the river as well so you do see that reflected in the river and also the river does run parallel to quite a few roads uh between around the chenes area for example and we know that there’s quite a lot of uh Road runoff as

Well entering the river uh in those sections so you do as you say see this rapid response but as well as the sort of groundwater signature as well from the from the groundwater in the river is there anything else Carri that you okay great so why are so many chalk

Streams not at good ecological status so one thing is flows um low flows low water availability because of public water supply high levels of water demand in our area and high levels of plant housing growth and I’ll show you some um figures later on in the second half of

The talk uh talking about um high levels of water demand in the area compared to the rest of the country because we’re not very good at um conserving water in the in the chilon unfortunately water quality as well is is important so we see a siltation of gravels so we see

This fine sediment getting into the river system clogging up the river bed in filling those gravels and that can lead to low oxygen levels for example in the river we’ve got high night nitrate and phosphate concentrations as well and I’ve talked about that nitrate issue nitrate gets into rivers from a

Combination of agricultural AC activity so runoff but also from seage treatment works as well so there is quite a high proportion of nitrate getting into the river chess from the sewage treatment works at chesham and as I’ve said at the moment high concentrations of phosphorus from that sewage treatment works as well

Although they have phosphorus stripping uh going in at that sewage treatment works um so hopefully that situation will change fairly soon um sewage discharge and untreated sewage discharge is also an issue for a lot of chalk streams and of course the consequences there are poor invertebrates and fish

Communities where all of these impacts are happening this combination of low flows and water quality poor water quality and that’s often referred to as chalk stream Mala when we don’t know exactly the reason why the chalk streams are not reaching good ecological status but we know there’s a combination of

Factors and just a reminder of what we’re looking for in a good aquatic uh ecosystem a good chalk system we’re looking for this um combination of the the fish species the trout kind of iconic fish species the high invertebrate life lots of plants um both

On the bank and in the river as well um plants that actually need to be rooted in gravel if there if this River bed was just fine sediment these plants wouldn’t be existing in the way that they are in this Photograph because they would be uprooted by any higher flows and washed

Down the river system so they need gravel to get their Roots around to embed themselves and successfully stay in that in that river system and what’s really important is that link between these plants the insects and the fish so for example without those long trailing stands of ronculus you can see in the

Photo you wouldn’t have all the invertebrates living on those leaves of the of the ronculus taking shelter in those area you wouldn’t have good fish refugia for example so for young fish to develop you need these sort of uh side areas where you have these um emergent what I’d call emergent plants where

Young fish can take refuge as well so all of these sort of characteristics are really important for a healthy chalk ecosystem so bit quiz for you here can you tell us what all of these species are and which is the odd one out don’t think we can give a prize over the over

The web but it’ be great to hear from you if you know which one is the odd one out and why and can you name these different um species or do put anything in the chat if you want to OD one out in the chat would be

Good if anyone knows what it is and why yeah we are getting a few things popping up in the Trap so we’ we’ve had uh water bow and brown trout successfully identified perfect and suggestion that the crayfish on the right hand side is the odd one out yeah

And why we haven’t had a why it is though when I first saw one of these in the river chess I thought it was someone had thrown a lobster in they are quite large but this is the invasive signal crayfish and it’s an invasive species

And that’s why it’s the odd one out in this photo it really shouldn’t be in the river um but we know we have them in large quantities we see them on the riverbed we’re taking a walk around during the day they’re actually nocturnal so you probably see an awful

Lot more if you saw if you went out to the river at night they borrow into the river banks and then un fortunately they cause the river banks to start to Decay away and and um recede as well so they’re actually causing quite a lot of

Problems uh on the chess and then the middle is the Water Crest we did get Water Crest Emma Emma jumped in with Water Crest and I have to say James one one surprise for invasive American signal crayfish way well done brilliant okay do you know about winterborn sections of a chalk stream

This um plot here is trying to explain uh what happens uh to chalk streams in their upper reaches in relation to the level of groundwater so the top of this the top plot to the left is when the water table is quite high so groundwater levels are quite High um and so that

Groundwater intersects the soil surface quite high up the valley so if you imagine um there when you’re water table intersects that surface of the soil you get uh Springs appearing so that’s where you’ve got the the river the topmost Headwater of the river appear as that

Water table drops over time so it’s it’s rising and falling throughout the year as it drops then that um point at which the water table intersects the slope here drops further down the valley and so your River appears further Downstream so chalk streams migrate their Headwaters migrate up and down

Valleys in response to the rising and falling groundwater so some years though you will see uh areas of the riverbed at the top uh of the river in the headwaters that aren’t flowing so these photographs on the right here show a dry riverbed um this is uh in chesham

Itself and during a drought year when the um Headwaters have really moved quite far down the valley so it’s a natural phenomenon but the question is also to what extent are we making this worse by um abstracting the groundwater so actually these types of chalk streams are highly valued ecologically for these winterborn

Sections when they occur naturally so these some of these sections should dry out during um years when there’s low water table and they have specialist species that live in these areas so it’s not that this movement is a Bad Thing per se it becomes problematic when you have far

More lower groundwater years because of abstraction over abstraction and lower flows within the river because of over abstraction so you will see around the country and chalky areas many places called uh winterborn something or born something where and it’s indicative of Springs and winterborn sections of these chalk

Streams very happy to go through that again Carri if there’s any questions in in the chat about that um you’ve seen um this data set before but this is just going from 2020 to 2024 you can see for example here in 2022 we had a period per of time when

The river flows were lower than average and then you will have seen the river bed drying up um in the upper reaches of chesham for example in the winterborn sections of the of the river chess so flows can be quite changeably changeable quite naturally in chalk streams in terms of human disruption and

Just a summary of of the types of issues we associate now with these chalk streams and problems abstraction for drinking water Road runoff I’ve explained um just channelization of the river concreting concreting in the river sections where you can’t get the kind of plant growth um that you might have had

In the past and you’re straightening the river channel uh runoff from agriculture carrying with it sediments and pesticides and fertilizers um domestic water use so abstraction for domestic water use and plastic litter is obviously an emerging um issue that a lot of people are becoming more aware of as well which is

Um a particular problem Downstream as so as treatment works as well okay should we take a break and then after the Break um I’ll take you through all the learning material that we’ve created for the chess and we can explore a few of the resources that are

Online if there are any questions you want answered in just pop them into the chat and I’ll try and address those when we come back but if we take a break then come back at five past five hopefully that will work are you happy for me to start make a start

Great during the just before the uh break I think Sean put a question into the chat to ask about um understanding when raw surge might be entering the river chess um temps water have a map of what they call their event duration monitors um which basically is

A map that informs you when a sewage treatment works is discharging from Storm tanks so for example um we can click on um the chesham Su treatment works now and you can see that the monitor indicates that stormflow is currently discharging into the river chess so this means there could be

Sewage in this section of the water course so that’s the best uh resource drawn that I know of um to to understand whether uh raw sewage is entering the river chess so I’ll go back to our our slides now so we’ve put together um some resources for teaching um 16 plus uh for

Human Geography physical geography for biology and for environmental scientists as well and I’m just going to take you through some of those resources at the moment um krie I think you were going to talk about the first three of these resources and just tell people what they

Are and how they came about yeah absolutely just a quick mention because the first three were produced by the the project um without the involvement of the University um as I said at the beginning we the sense we have from speaking to secondary teachers in the

Area is there’s not a huge demand for us to lead fieldwork visits um because either you’re doing it yourselves or as I said there’s a field studies Council Center locally who specialize in that so we focused on trying to produce some really high quality resources that people can use to support their learning

Um the first three tabs on this page and so this is a a screenshot from our website are three films that we commissioned um so the first one is is a general introduction it covers a lot of the the information that Kate has given you about the characteristics of a chalk

Stream about what makes him special um and about some of the the wildlife associated with them the second one is an animation um and it’s actually um I was amazed to find out it’s one of the most visited pages on our website so I don’t know whether that’s that’s all

Teachers or whether there’s just a lot of people out there with questions but um it’s an animation explaining how chalkstream works the relationship between the aquifer and the river and particularly that winterborn cycle so how the the flow varies through the year um but as I say that’s been very well

Watched so we we have these on our education pages but we also have it as a a general kind of information resource on the website as well um and both of those films are around about 3 minutes long they’re not particularly well they’re not specifically um targeted at any

Secondary age group but there is general interest um but I think that they would be relevant for for some of the work that you you need to cover the third one is a bit longer so it’s more like seven or eight minutes long and that includes interviews with the um project manager

Of the Chilton’s chalk stream project and a couple of the the quite vocal and and long-standing local activists um one on the river chess and one on the river ver and it just covers some of the the various threats that that chalk streams face so again some of the things that

We’ve covered this evening but it’s not it’s a nice summary and it’s a few different voices and a few um kind of real people giving you their their opinions so again it could be could be useful as a an introduction or as the start of an activity um and it covers

Things like a abstraction water quality invasive species um you know the kind of things that we’ve talked about this evening so as I say that they’ve been reasonably well watched particularly the animation but please do do make use of them in the classroom if you

Can perfect thanks I’m G to come out of the presentation if I can um and make my way to the dashboard River chess and then I will start sharing again okay so um kri might have put this into the chat for you um so this is the observatory for the river chest the

Story maps that we have created so you can look at the the river chess in terms of a kind of trip down the river chess so we’ve got three different Journeys down the river chess um that talk about the relationship between groundwater and surface water and talk about the issues

On the chess and use data from the environment agency um in terms of flow data and water quality data to kind of explain the the river chess um and embedded in this is also our water quality dashboard which I’ll come to in a minute and also we

Have some sensors on the chess um and the story map takes you through what we’re actually measuring with these sensors as well so that’s very much the chemical side of things um and what things like temperature dissolved oxygen mean what electrical conductivity means so these are also learning resources

Um in terms of looking at how these story Maps sort of play out um and I hope you can see this as I scroll through but essentially you scroll downwards um and we take you through what is a chalk stream um and there are various links to different explanations

As well and and other resources um and there are maps that you can zoom in on so as you go through the text you’ll zoom in on the chilon um and start to zoom in on the actual River chest so you can see where it flows from two we have

Photographs um we talk about what a catchment is in a river system uh the urban areas of the catchment so it’s essentially like doing a little mini field trip around the river chess and you can have a look um then at what the types of ecology are for a um a chalk stream

Things like the trout that we’ve found Osprey in the river um talking about the chess as a resource we we ran a series of um questionnaires at local Fates and fairs a number of years ago and collected people’s thoughts in association with the river chess as well

How it made them feel um and then we talk about the pressures on the chess as well so we talk about public water supply um and we go into detail on river flows as well with some nice uh videos of flowing stre of the artisian wells in

The chess um so where you can see water bubbling up and the kind kinds of diagrams that I’ve shown you today as well are there so that’s a I’m not going to go through all of that as a resource now but that’s for you to be able to

Explore and we suggest that could be something to go through with students or allow students to explore in their own time to give them further information as well so there’s three of those individual story maps that you can work your way through the first one is the general

Introduction um and then they get more detailed in terms of the the level of knowledge and information as you move to two and three uh number four is our kind of call for help for citizen scientists to work with us on the river chess um

And then as I say later I’ll go through water quality dashboard Etc so to go back to the talk and just tell you a little bit more about our um material we’ve also got this inquiry based learning scheme so that’s a kind of a scheme U for

Teachers to think about what types of management issues they might want to talk about about with students on the river chess so the hydrology for example um water flows I’ll go through that a little bit more in the next few slides we’ve got a link to the water quality

Dashboard so you can download data for the chess I’ll show you that in a moment um and we’ve also got some educational posters as well so um just uh PDFs that you could print off or PDFs that you could send as slides or use as slide decks for example if you’re trying to

Highlight some of the critical issues um in the in the chat or in other chalk streams or other rivers around the country so in terms of why did we put this kind of material together um so that um we could help students understand the challenges of managing

Water Resources in the river chess um to allow a better understanding of the combination of different issues that surround Water Management so the environmental issues but also the political issues and the socio and economic issues as well all of those obviously come into play um so we’ve

Tried to include material related to all of those different aspects and to help students think P perhaps about long-term solutions to how to manage water quality in chalk streams we’ve also provided you with data that you can download as um Excel spreadsheets or CSV files so that

You the you could plot that students could get into drawing graphs they could do a level projects for example on this data um because we have data that’s been collected at 15 minute intervals from our sensors going back to 2019 now so there’s a real wealth of data uh out

There if the students want to use it um and the idea being that um students could bring this information together to present reports and show evidence of being able to synthesize data to make value judgments about Water Resources management so I’ve shown you um the the

Story map here so that’s a resource to explore um the idea of the inquiry based learning material was to think about Bloom’s taxonomy which I’m sure you’re all aware of but that idea that you could REM um move from students understanding um recognizing and recalling facts from this remember part

Of the blooms taxonomy up through helping them to understand what these facts mean and to then to apply those facts um and Concepts and ideas to a real life situation such as water management um Water Resources management in the chest um and then up to the higher parts of

The blooms taxonomy where they’re analyzing data and information breaking it down into its component parts judging the value of that material as well so questioning that material just not just taking it at face value um and then recombining it to make a new whole and new report um so we’ve tried to include

Information that’s at the bottom in this remember area so for example facts and figures like 77% of chalk streams being below a good standard of Health in 2014 um things like the river chess is in the Chilton it’s suffering for over abstraction so you’ll find sort of knowledge facts scattered through the

Material um and within the inquiry based learning material there is this schematic for teachers to think about um what they might want to do with their students at different levels within that blooms taxonomy so this these are just ideas of why we’ve provided the material

And what we think you could do with it um just to sort of spark ideas and to also signpost you through the material we’ve signposted you to some of the slides that are available and where some of the material is um I just wanted to show you um for

Example you can download flow data for the chess from the EA gauging station site that we that we showed you um and it’s quite nice to look at long-term trends in data in these Rivers because you can really see um drought periods for example and flooding periods so you

Can see uh here in the chess that the in the 1990s between 1995 and 2000 there was an extended period of of lower flows um so periods where uh the Water the river was dry at times um and then you can also see times when we had much higher

Groundwater levels and higher flows as well when we will have seen like these inputs from A Fine sediment Etc so getting your students to understand that variability in flow that whilst there is a an annual pattern of sort of winter and summer there are also longer term changes in these patterns that relates

To longer term weather conditions so you know three or four years of below average rainfall leads to eventually these these lower patterns within the chess so um you can start to piece together the different parts of the of the sort of discharge puzzle if you like looking

At these types of data sets if your students don’t like looking just at line graphs there are things like heat Maps as well um so this is uh an alternative way of showing flow data you’ve got year on this bottom axis and you’ve got month

Um on the y- axis here and the flow is colorcoded essentially so the darker red colors are periods of of drought and the green colors are periods of high flow within the river so this is a much more visual way um I think of of grasping information about flow it’s essentially

Showing you the same information as the previous slide but in a in a very different way from um a kind of line plot if you like so there are lots of different ways of um presenting this data and you can access this through our sites as

Well just to give you a little bit more information on what we’ve been doing with water quality sensors because this data is all available for you to download and to have a lookout with your students if they wanted to do sort of A- level projects for example with the data

Sets we’ve had six uh sensors in the river chess which we installed four of them first in 2019 they’re connected to Telemetry so connected uh real time you can look at the data from the sensors um and um there for a number of different parameters uh so different variables

That are written here they’re continuously logging at 15minute intervals so you can look at for example the pH the alkalinity and acidity of the river system and how that changes over time you can look at temperature of the river water you can look at the electrical conductivity which is

Measuring the solutes in the water and you can look at the oxygen concentration Oxygen’s really important um because um the fish need oxygen to breathe the invertebrates need healthy oxygen conditions in the chalk stream um when we get for example sewage spills those oxygen levels change in the in the river

Chest so there’s lots of patterns that you can see and you could get into the reasons for the changes in patterns over time and download that data and for each of these water quality parameters we have um sheet that you can download that tells you what they are and gives you example

Data as well to help students interpret the meaning of these different um phrases like what is pH what is water quality what is water temperature for example so um I showed you in the story map there’s this uh dashboard um I can try and demonstrate that to you now it’s

A bit slower so we’ll see whether it actually works at the moment again I’ll stop sharing and then get into the dashboard and then try and share it again with you we may just get please wait for a long time but let’s have a

Look y okay so this is what you do if you what you see when you come into the um water quality data dashboard you see a little bit information about the project um and a sort of welcome page that tells you what to do with the different um

Icons here there is live data but you can also go into the time series so what it does at first is it uploads all the data that’s available for the chess and plots it as line graphs so we’re pulling in rainfall data from the environment

Agency um this is this plot here is just set up at the moment to show you electrical conductivity and temperature so let’s just take um temperature for example so we can update the plot you can click on and off the different measurements and these will show graphs

For you you can also zoom in so here you can see um each color is a different uh water quality sensor a different part of the river so you’ve got a map to the left so the color on the plot corresponds to the dot so the furthest

Upstream sensor which is Upstream of the sewage treatment works is is red um and you can see as you move Downstream you’ve got different different sensors here plotted in different colors these two sites five and six they were only added um in 2022 so you can see some

More colors here and you can click on and off SES so we can simplify this um let’s have site one and site two on for example and we can take off sites four and five just by clicking like that so that you can simplify the data and zoom

In on it you can see the annual variation in water temperature here um you can see these two sites are um near the seage treatment works and you can see that um in the summer the water temperature is hotter and in the winter it’s colder um and you can just zoom in

On any data that you want and it will redraw um the plot for you so quite nice for students then to be able to download that because you can also go and download that that data um as well so you can pick a date um and and choose

The data from that from that time scan and then you can update the plot and you can also go to the download function and download any data that you want as well so hopefully that’s quite a flexible system that allows you to um provide data for students to do various

Um examples with and then the live data is a live feed from two of our sensors um which I think is yeah it’s working fairly fast at the moment it gives you the the rainfall and then plots um the data as well and again you can click on

And off the different water quality param parameters so I don’t know if there’s any questions in relation to to that but we’ve put that out there for you guys to to use um as little or as much as you as you would like but we’d hope that um students can explore

Changes in water quality parameters in response to rainfall using this type of data set right I’ll just get us back to the slides I will um just add while you’re you’re doing that Kate that we I mean I I’ll make the request at the end or after the the workshop but we obviously

Have a lot of data available to us so the water quality sensors are providing us with a huge amount of data on a number of variables um one of my colleagues at the Chilton’s chalk streams project is a citizen science officer and she’s working with quite a

Big team of volunteers who are mainly concentrated on the chess um to run a number of different surveys particularly around water quality but on on other things as well ecological surveys and all sorts of things um so we’re sitting on quite a lot of information it would

Be really useful to us to have your thoughts on on how we could present that so it’s useful for schools because the raw data is is Big um and it’s going to be a lot to process for for students that key stage four and five um but if

You have ideas or if you start to use this data please let us know how you use it because that can help us help to inform future resources that we might make yes so we had ideas for um picking out for example what I would call events

So uh plot restricted data so give people examples for example of what happens when it rains very intensely in the catchment what does the changes in water quality look like and have some annotations on on the graphs to explain that so if that kind of material would

Be of use and interesting do let us know because that’s the kind of next type of thing we’re thinking about developing um this is just a a sorry a plot of the river but with two you can see these two Green Dots here show two of the sensors one above the SE

Treatment works at chesh and one down at rickmansworth I was just going to show you a little bit of temperature data that someone’s plotted out here in Excel just to show you the kinds of things you can start asking about the data so this is just taking data from the 21st of

June to the 28th of June 2023 the blue line is Upstream of the sewage treatment works the red line is at rickmansworth so Downstream of the sewage treatment works the the downstream end of the river so you can start to obviously see first of all why

Is the data here so wavy what’s causing this um this cyclical pattern in temperature which leads you to obs observe that those are happening on a daily basis so this is a daily cycle and you can think about how sunlight might be affecting water temperature in a

Chalk Stream So in a lot of the media um information about uh chalk streams that we see at the moment they tell us that chalk stream water temperatures are 10 deg which they’re not the aquifer itself is um supplying water at 10 at about 10° Centigrade but very quickly when this

Water enters the stream because the Sun light falling on this this stream um you get the water heating up and the water in these in these types of rivers tends to be fairly shallow in the chest it’s often uh areas of ankle deep water for example so there’s lots of opportunity

For heating up of the water surface um so that means that you tend to get this this River heating up by day cooling down at night um and then also we’ve got far warmer Water by the time you’ve got down to rickmansworth compared to Upstream at chesham we have a lot of

Groundwater sources at chesham and fewer at rickmansworth as well um so you could also compare this to air temperature data for example and start to talk about these differences and why they exist and then we’ve got the SE treatment works as well of course that’s contributing to this change in temperature so through

Just taking Snippets of the data and plotting it out you can start looking at uh reasons for changes in these different parameters in the river we’ve got explan about other water quality variables like electrical conductivity and changes in oxygen as well so different diagrams explaining why oxygen changes on different uh to different

Time scales um that’s all in there as well for you to explore if you if you want to um another interesting thing we found with these sensors was after snowy conditions and this has literally just happened yesterday this is data from last year but if you went to our live

Data stream and looked at the last couple of days you’d see this has happened again um this uh black line here is electrical conductivity the blue line is temperature um this is just a screenshot of of a graph so sorry I haven’t sort of put the proper axes on it but the Blue

Line shows you that the this is last year 18th of December temperature Rose air temperature rose water temperature Rose um and at that time there was lots of snow around the roads Road gritting had happened and those Road gritting salts got washed into the river with the snow melt and raised the electrical

Conductivity of the river so sodium and and Chlor chloride were entering the river system and that was adding to the the total amount of solutes in the river so we we saw a sharp peak in electrical conductivity when that happened and that’s happened again this year as well

After our our Thor in the last couple of days so these are the kind of things you can look at with the data um and that allows you to move sort of to to analysis of data as well so from simple facts to uh doing exercises with analysis um and then synthesis as

As well um just wanted to explain to you a little bit about why um we’re in a water stressed environment if you look at rainfall patterns in the UK you can see that the the west of the country here is colored blue with high average um annual rainfall um in places of

Greater than 3,000 millimeters um but as you move across to the east of the country there’s a real rain shadow effect and into the East we see much lower annual rainfall totals of sort of 600 to 700 millimet of rainfall per year and London actually receives less rainfall than Rome Istanbul and Dallas

And half as much as Sydney in Australia so we are in a water stressed uh region and of course with climate change that rain is falling in ever more intense periods of time as well um so our patterns of rainfall as well as our totals are are changing um so that’s why

There’s quite an emphasis for these chalk streams on Water Resources issues as well it’s not just the over abstraction it’s also patterns of rainfall dry and um and wet um years of rainfall this is the type of stimulus material so small sort of um Snippets of information we’ve provided for students

To get them talking about the data that’s out there so this for example is looking at um average water use in the region in the temps in compare as compared to anglian region and southern region in the UK Affinity is also a local um water

Company um and you can see here that by comparison on average the people in Denmark use 80 lers of water per person per day in the temps region um we used 154 in uh liters per person per day 2012 to 2013 146 2016 to 2017 we’re an area of the UK

That uses a lot of water in our homes so that could be a kind of discussion point with students we’ve got information for you about how water usage in the home breaks down into the different components as well um and there’s this handy sort of diagram about how the different water

Habits use uh ad up total usage water and I think it’s quite quite um a compelling sort of uh discussion to have there’s 8.8 million customers in the temps region and they use on average uh as of 2022 about 157 liters um of water a day and that’s higher than the

National average of 130 lers of water a day compare it with place like Denmark where people are using 80 liters of water per day so why do we use so much water in this area and then think about the fact that 80% of this water supply comes from Rivers 20% comes from

Groundwater and that the amount we use does affect the flow in our Rivers so you could be asking the students questions like what could you do to save water should you be trying to save water um or why should we try to save water so what what are their thoughts on this so

That that’s what we mean by evidence-based materials provide them with this information and then start working through some questions with them um we’ve also got um a stimulus sheet about low flows in the river chest with some photos of the same site in a drought year uh and in a high flow year

And some quotes as well from um other organizations talking about um the levels of water in the chter to try and and get discussion about Chalk streams and differences in water level from year to year and then bottom here is a quote about uh warm years in the UK and

Climate change as well again to try and just stimulate some discussion around climate change um the idea with this um evidencebased material is that you’re posing questions to the students posing a starting question a greater starting question and then get them to to pose a load of questions around that so we did

This with some of the students um in their first year at Queen Mary asked whether the river chess is disappearing from some of the information that they had on the on the web and then got them to sort of start to think about questions that go with that and the kind

Of facts that they could use to to interrogate that a bit further so they were ask asking questions like are the low flows that they were seeing on the hydrograph natural were the low were the low flows man-made what was the balance of evidence for one or the other um how did

The changes um in the water flows affect the River Health so what’s the ecological impacts is the situation getting worse wanted to know like what does the future hold in terms of climate change in terms of increasing demand for water um and how could things be improved so leading to what was there

What were the their ideas for sustainable Water Management plans and we asked them to wrap that up in a report that set out the issues for the chess now and into the future and suggest to us some um ways that they could see that things might improve what

Would they do if they were a river officer working in the Chess at the moment what would they be how would they be trying to get people working together to improve um the flows in the river chess so those are the types of exercises you could think about working

Through the um material that we’ve created in the module plan um we’ve tried to divide into themes for you so hydrology and short catchments River Health so looking at the Ecology of the river the human interactions in the river chest in the drainage basin how can we manage water demand and creating

Sustainable water Futures as well so if you want to look at that material um it is subdivided into different topics with suggestions as to how you might want to use the material and I just wanted to end with um a a slide looking at Future pressures on the catchment and climate change

Scenarios so the this is a um an infographic from the Met Office and from um UK sip which is essentially saying what we might expect to happen in terms of temperature and in terms of changes in rainfall pattern into the future and I think it’s quite a useful resource for

Starting to ask questions about might what might happen in the chest catchment so the idea here is it sets different scenarios As you move higher in temperature so if we move to sort of a plus4 degree uh rise in temperature obviously we’re getting extremely hot days where temperatures exceed 25

Degrees are likely to become much more frequent you could relate this back to water temperatures in the chess so we’ve got some information on the fact that if temperatures in rivers exceed 20 degrees that’s really important for species like uh trout so fish like trout for example

Um would have a real problem if as water temperatures exceed 20° and we’re starting to see that on on our sensors so you can see during the times where we’ve measured water temperature in some sites during hot summers our temperatures are exceeding 20° so more hot weather days are going to cause

Problems for chalk for shallow chalk streams and then we’ll see fewer uh cold days where there’s very cold conditions and as we might be noticing uh we’ll see um increased number of days of intense and prolonged heavy rainfall as well so heavy rainfall in relation to chalk

Streams you could think about um what does that mean for fine sediment moving into the river so we get a lot of runoff a lot of agricultural runoff and Road runoff um from heavy rainfall displacing soil and moving that into the river system so that could be a point of

Discussion and of course less frequent rainfall will increase the occurrence of severe droughts that’s going to change groundwater levels we’re already seeing evidence of that in the chilon um so again that’s affecting potentially flows in a river so making that link between climate change scenarios and what we

Might hypothesize is going to happen to a chalk stream as a result could be a kind of useful exercise to go through um this is quite a nice resource that I’ve found as well on the BBC you can ask it what will climate change look like near me you can put in your

Postcode um and they give you various different scenarios for your area in terms of changes in temperature um and changes in rainfall pattern as well so I think that was my final um slide so I’ll stop sharing and I guess it’s probably open to the floor for maybe 10 minutes just

If there if there are any questions that anyone wants to ask us hi thanks for the um presentation is really useful across a load of different perspectives there can I just ask a question about um River quality on the chest again and I appreciate you sent us

The um the um event duration Maps which are really useful but in terms of um raw sewage being released and the fuss that’s being made about that at the moment um are we in a a situation where um if I check that that site for sewage releases it’s possibly going to show

Releases not at storm times and therefore we are in a position where FW for example might be unsafe yeah so I would have I would check I definitely check that EDM map um at the moment it’s most likely that it will be discharging during and After High rainfall events

The other scenarios we have seen on the chess is high groundwater levels causing discharges as well historically so it’s not just after intense rainfall that you could see um storm tank discharges occurring um I would always be checking that that map before I go and doing a risk assessment uh associated with that

Um personally that’s what I would do if I was uh running still running field trips to the river chess for students I I believe as well that um it shows you if there’s what the live situation is but it also will tell you what the most recent discharge was um so

If you’re concerned you know it might if it’s not discharging right now but it was discharging an hour ago you can also find that out so it’s not just the current situation it does discharge just downst stream of chesham that’s the other thing so if you’re visiting the river um in

Chesham town or on chesham mall that’s up stream if the series treatment works so that won’t be affected yeah I I just I think we normally go to Sarah and then scotchbridge Mill which obviously be Downstream um but of course the problem is is that if if one’s planned a field

Trip then it’s everything’s in place um by the time you do your checks and it’s then a quick decision about whether you go or not based on what you’re saying that’s the that’s theet I guess yeah yeah no it is it’s it’s a a difficult decision to make isn’t it with

Planning in terms of the resources yes we can uh make those available so that’s fine I don’t know krie we’re recording this we going to make it available on we can do yet fine um I just I of mentioned it earlier on but but I I probably will follow this

Up with a survey because I I would imagine people don’t want to stay longer than they have to now at the end of a long day but um it would be incredibly useful to us to know what else you would like from us and other resources that

Might be useful for you and particularly around the data that we are producing from this from the water quality Sunan from citizen science scientists but also there you know there are various things like we’re actively involved in River restoration projects on on the river chess and other local rivers are case

Studies of that work useful for example um there is a big funded project called the chess SM water catchment which is initiated by TS water that’s bringing a lot of investment into the chess Valley um and also separately from that terms water are investing heavily in their seage infrastructure and upgrading the

Seage treatment works you know again we don’t we’re not kind of putting information out about that there is some if you go digging but is that kind of thing is it helpful to know how the river is being managed what the future management is would it be more useful

For us to put energy into Data analysis data presentation um perhaps GIS activities so so as I say any any kind of Clues you can give us so we’re making sure that we’re producing the things that you you need and you will use would be much appreciated either either today or

Afterwards okay I think if we if no one has any burning questions or points to make um at the moment then it’s probably time to say good evening and thank thank you very much for your time but say you if anything occurs to you about things that you would like or any questions

From today then please do contact us I think my my details are on the event information that you received and thank you very much Kate for your time thanks everyone for attending it’d be really good to see the feedback and see uh what else we can add to the to

The material we’ve already got out there great thank you