If you live in or near the Pang catchment, please sign up to join us for a Mud Spotter training day on Tuesday 15^th October from 10am – 1pm at the Pangbourne Village Hall, where we’ll be learning to survey sediment flows in the catchment. Parking is available right outside the hall. Tea, coffee and cake will be provided!
 
This is an ecologically important task as much of the Pang ends up with a layer of silt that can smother the clean gravel riverbed beneath, suffocating fish eggs and riverfly. The best solution is to keep the sediment out in the first place, and Mud Spotter is the first step in a wider plan to tackle sediment sources in the catchment.
 
It’s an activity you can do in your own time, solo or in pairs depending on preference. Perfect if you live in the Pang catchment and don’t mind stormy walks as the mud spotting itself is done during or just after rainfall. Once you’ve been trained, it’s a quick activity involving filling out a short survey for each runoff point that you find.
 
If you have any local knowledge of areas that have high runoff this is a good chance to put it into action and track down the source. We’ve also had modelling done mapping out how surface water flows in the Pang catchment, so our Project Officer James will be flagging hotspots to investigate where sediment likely enters the Pang.
 
The plan is to work our way up the catchment to where the sediment originates from, working with landowners to manage this runoff and keep mud in the fields and out our chalk streams. 

If you'd like to be a citizen scientist Mud Spotter volunteer please email anna@riverkennet.org to book your place.