Remote monitors track River Nar restoration project 10 May 2013

A remote river monitoring station installed late last year (2012) has been successfully tracking water quality and flow before and after river restoration work on the River Nar, in Norfolk, at an area of ecological importance.

Assisted by funds from WWF-UK, the Coca-Cola Partnership and the Catchment Restoration Fund, the Norfolk Rivers Trust established the £609,000 river and flood plain restoration project in June 2012 to reduce pollution.

In line with the Water Framework Directive, it is geared primarily to the Nar achieving good ecological status by 2015 – improving the habitat for wildlife and promoting biodiversity.

Prior to the project, the Norfolk Rivers Trust measured water quality by collecting weekly samples and transferring them to its laboratory for analysis – a time-consuming and expensive activity that only produced spot data.

In order to establish a continuous monitoring regime, OTT Hydrometry provided a Hydrolab Minisonde water quality monitor and an Adcon A755 low-power RTU (remote telemetry unit). In combination with a bed mounted Doppler flow meter (provided by the Environment Agency), the river monitoring station now provides a complete record of the river's condition.

The Minisonde 5 takes measurements for turbidity, flow, conductivity, temperature and LDO (luminescent dissolved oxygen) every 15 minutes. Flow and water chemistry data is then stored and transmitted every hour via GPRS (the site has poor GSM coverage) to an online server hosted by OTT.

This allows information to be downloaded and analysed in the Trust's office without site visits. Data can be accessed at anytime from anywhere using the Adcon app – a service that OTT UK managing director Simon Wills describes as invaluable for the project team.

"This project is a good example of how simple and low-cost it can now be to create a monitoring station that is sufficiently flexible to collect and transmit data from a variety of monitors," states Wills.

"Advances in sensor, data logging, communications and power management technology have combined to dramatically improve the effectiveness of remote data collection," he continues.

"[This] means that less site visits are necessary; thereby saving a great deal of time and money that can be spent on restoration."

Project officer Helen Mandley is convinced: "We currently monitor downstream of one of the new reed beds, but in the future we would like to place more monitoring equipment upstream of the reed bed to really see the differences, particularly in levels of turbidity and conductivity."

Brian Tinham

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