Once a month the Fresh water monitoring team have come together at Grove Farm to test the water at various locations from ponds to our stream Coston's Brook. To date we have carried out 20 fresh water tests since we started the project 5 months ago and we've had 3 and 7 members of our group attend the sessions.

Without the funding from Microsoft and the support of Freshwater watch we wouldn't have managed to start a water monitoring project for the local nature reserve. A project that we have been trying to start for 2 years now. Water monitoring is one of our key goals as a group to ensure that the water running through the site is not only safe for animals but humans as well.

Our data on freshwater watch is also being shared with other groups to get a understanding of the issues affecting water in London. We plan to continue the project to provide a base line of information that can be used with other monitoring projects operating in or on tributaries that feed into the River Brent.

For details on our last event and to watch a video that we created, please follow this link:

https://www.friendsofgrovefarm.org/news-1/change-x-water-monitoring---may-24

Welcome Claudia, great that you’ve joined the group. We look forward to seeing you on 27 April.
Anna

We held our first team water testing training event. 3 more members have been trained up to run the tests & we tested three of our sites again.

The results are different from last time with Coston’s brook by Whitton Avenue being the most polluted but our ponds fairing better this time.

You can see our results here: https://www.freshwaterwatch.org/pages/friends-of-grove-farm

Thanks all for coming & looking forward to others joining at future sessions.

Hi all, we have our Freshwater training on Saturday. We'd love to see you here at Grove Farm if you're available.

Thanks

Hi and welcome to Diz Selby-Burwell and Robert Teeling. We hope you'll be able to join us on our training session next month.

Hi all,
A quick update to tell you that we have had our training from Freshwater watch, got the kit & did our first trial run of testing today led by our project manager Olena.

We tested 6 sites across Grove Farm. It had rained heavily the day before & so there was plenty of water to test. The tests were a little fiddly to begin with but we soon got the hang of it. See some pics below. You can already see 5 of the results online at our Friends of Grove Farm Freshwater Watch. See the link below if you are interested.

We can see a mix of results. Turbidity - whether the water is clear or not - is an issue in two of our testing spots (water coming into the ephemeral pond) and water quality seems to be changing on Coston’s brook as we go through the site. But these are only a few data points. We look forward to getting more data to see what patterns & trends we uncover.

We look forward to running our first group training session on Saturday March 23rd at 2pm.

Action plan:

Timeline: When will you be able to start your project? How often will your team meet? Are there any key dates to share for the project?

We can start our project right away, as soon as we get connected with Earthwatch.  The start of our timeline depends on how quickly Earthwatch can engage with us and get us set up on their platform and provide training.  Within a month of completing the online training, we will set up our next team meeting to train the other members of the team and organise the details of the rest of the monthly monitoring.  We will then have monthly meetings after to do the monitoring. After the final month of monitoring we will have a team meeting were we present the analysis, discuss our conclusions and create an action plan.  

Budget: You don't need to share exact prices, but please share how you're planning to spend the seed funding & what costs you're anticipating to get your project up and running:

The cost of the Freshwater Watch equipment and training is covered by this grant. We do not need any further funding to complete this project. If the water quality is not good, we will use the seed funding provided to continue to monitor the water quality in Grove Farm next year, by paying for another year’s subscription to Freshwater Watch Programme. Currently the prices are given as £240 for renewal plus £10 per additional kit.  It is not clear from the information we have how many refill kits we would need. If the water quality is good, we will use the £500 to run another community monitoring project in Grove Farm. 

Impact: How will your community benefit from this project? Do you have any measurable goals for your project, such as the number of people that will participate? Are you hoping to spread knowledge or increase interest in a specific subject?

Our community will benefit from this project because it will help us to understand the quality of water in our nature reserve and if it is being polluted and if so provide evidence to help persuade other stakeholders to act to reduce pollution. It will improve our knowledge of water pollution and monitoring. We will connect with other environmental groups in our local area who have an interest in the same water course and spread our learnings from the project as well as share insights we have about the water quality of our site, in the aim to develop more joint up knowledge about Coston's Brook, the stream that runs through our nature reserve and beyond. In the process, we will engage more members of the community to be actively involved in an environmental project, but encouraging more people to participate in the water monitoring.  We aim to engage 5 people in water monitoring for the first time. 

Location: If your project requires physical space, have you decided the location? Do you have all necessary permission and permits to carry out your project at the chosen location?

The project will take place at Grove Farm, Ealing. We will test the water bodies within the nature reserve. We have the necessary permission to carry out our project at the chosen location as it is owned and managed by Ealing Council and we work closely with them to support the maintenance of the nature reserve.