On 17 April a member of Salisbury & District Angling Club's 'Water Quality Team' was spotted unloading equipment near Mill Lane as he was about to embark on a routine water sampling from the nearby Avon. The results will be shared with the Environment Agency, Wiltshire Fishery Association and other interested parties.
From the SDAC website: "Improving the water quality of our rivers, streams and lakes has become a daily theme in the media. It is a national issue with anglers and other water users putting pressure on politicians to act.
The club started its journey in 2009 when we established our river-fly monitoring programme. A group of trained club volunteers took monthly samples from specific river locations monitoring the health of the water. In 2015 we embarked on “invertebrate benchmarking” which is the most reliable way to measure water quality in our rivers and streams by understanding the fly diversity and overall number of river-flies, looking at fly population trends."
More information is available on the SDAC website including data from previous testing, an example of which can be viewed in the PDF document below.