Projects overview
The Riverfly Partnership’s citizen science projects involve volunteers monitoring invertebrate populations in rivers and streams. The Riverfly Monitoring Initiative (RMI) is our original project — Urban Riverfly and Extended Riverfly are variants carried out in some areas, and include a wider range of invertebrates. Read about our core projects below.
The Riverfly Partnership acknowledges and thanks our partners, without whom none of these projects would have been developed or launched.
Riverfly core projects
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Riverfly Monitoring Initiative (RMI)
The Riverfly Monitoring Initiative (RMI) is a citizen science project that enables trained volunteers to protect river water quality by monitoring eight pollution-sensitive invertebrates and complement the work carried out by statutory agency staff across the UK.
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Urban Riverfly
Urban Riverfly includes an additional six aquatic invertebrate types to the eight used in the original RMI scheme and can be used across a number of different river systems, but especially modified rivers and those influenced by conurbations.
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Extended Riverfly
Includes 33 invertebrate groups to provide a more detailed picture of the stressors on a river than the basic RMI scheme.
Related partnership projects
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MoRPh
The MoRPh Survey enables river enthusiasts to record and assess physical habitat and hydromorphological functioning in rivers and streams.
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Freshwater Watch
A tool for monitoring water quality and water chemistry.
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Outfall Safari
A simple method to detect and report pollution as a result of misconnections.
Monitoring is an excellent way to protect river health while fostering local community, science and and sustainability.
Images on this page: David Johnson, Jonathan Plimmer, Andrew Head, Martin Smith, Sharon Flint, Neptuno Photography (all Flickr). H. Ferguson, The Riverfly Partnership.