This group addresses persistent challenges in local water quality monitoring, including inconsistent methodologies, fragmented datasets, and limited stakeholder coordination. With regulatory bodies under-resourced and water companies often self-reporting, transparency and reliability remain concerns. The group explores how citizen science can complement formal monitoring by filling data gaps, expanding spatial coverage, and engaging communities. It aims to develop clear national standards, incentives, and coordinated data-sharing frameworks to ensure credible, inclusive, and transparent environmental governance.

Input from participants of the 3rd Clean Water South workshop identified a number of challenges. The 4th workshop created a set of project briefs to tackle  these:

• How can we enhance community‑driven data collection to inform decision-making? Find the challenge here.
• How do we standardise citizen science sampling in water quality monitoring to maximise impact? Find the challenge here.
• Standardised chalk stream education topic packs for schools. Find the challenge here.
• How can we share and visualise data to maximise impact on improving water quality? Find the challenge here.

See the Shared Documents in this team for full workshop 3 output and policy brief for this theme, as well as the project briefs produce in workshop 4.