缅北轮奸

River ecosystems are impacted by people in numerous ways. Whilst headlines might focus on a single problem, like sewage, river health is negatively affected by multiple human pressures, including intensive land use, habitat degradation, water abstraction and contaminants. Currently, it is difficult to determine which pressures are having the greatest ecological impact at specific locations to target improvements.

In our research and development project, we are using cutting-edge genetic sequencing technology to diagnose the underlying reasons for poor river health. We are focusing our study on the bed of the river, where a diverse community of microorganisms grow on rocks and other submerged surfaces, known as riverbed biofilms. We are determining how different combinations of pressures affects the microbial composition of the biofilm. This information will help us identify key markers that can be used to assess pressures to target future mitigation and restoration.

Progress update

We are working in close collaboration with ColneCAN, a partnership of organisations dedicated to improving the River Colne and its tributaries. We had our kick-off meeting in mid-May 2025, where partners shared their local knowledge of the river systems to help us design our field survey. We are now in the middle of our summer fieldwork campaign. We are collecting riverbed biofilm samples from locations across the 6 waterbodies in the Colne catchment, which represent different combinations of pressures. Sampling is being done upstream and downstream of known and suspected point source pollution (e.g. wastewater treatment works, surface water outfalls), upstream and downstream of different land cover types (e.g. agricultural and urban) and in areas with different levels of hydrological and physical modification. Once this fieldwork is complete, we will be extracting the genetic material from the biofilms and running metagenomic sequencing.