NCEA small streams monitoring programme - site ground-truthing exercise

The DEFRA Natural Capital and Ecosystem Assessment (NCEA) programme is aiming to develop representative ecosystem monitoring programmes across freshwater and terrestrial environments. One of these monitoring programmes will focus on small streams and headwaters. The network design process is statistical and uses maps of small streams as a starting point. However, maps do not convey the physical characteristics of individual streams, information which is necessary to understand whether one map scale is more appropriate than another and to inform survey and assessment methods. This project will address this by obtaining site information for multiple example small streams sites. It is expected that each site will be visited and information about the site characteristics recorded against a spreadsheet questionnaire and with photographs. The information obtained will inform the final design of the NCEA small streams monitoring network. The example sites will be distributed across the length and breadth of the country and not all will be close to roads or footpaths or easy to access. This will be a reflection of the types of sites, and distribution of these, in the final NCEA small streams network.