SEVEN volunteers have been successfully accredited as Riverfly Surveyors at a training day at Willow Valley Holiday Park Bush.

Proprietors, Matt and Tina Lewis, kindly gave their facilities freely to enable Iain Barker from Cornwall Wildlife Trust, to teach them how to survey a river and catch and identify eight species of freshwater invertebrates.

These eight species are selected for survey as key indicators of pollution for their swift reaction to polluted waters.

The volunteers join five other volunteers in the Bude trained last year who will monitor around 30 sites in the Jacob’s Stream/Strat/Neet catchment area to monitor the health of the watercourses.

They have been trained to be able to detect any abnormal absence of these key indicator species — the larvae of Caddisflies, Mayflies, Stoneflies and adult Freshwater Shrimp — so that they can alert the Environment Agency to investigate any potential pollution incident.

Riverfly is a national initiative that has been developing over the last ten years throughout the country. Many rivers have their surveyors, but for the first time Cornwall is part of this network.

This is all in cooperation with the Bude Cleaner Seas Project better to protect our beaches by identifying pollution incidents that may affect parts of the catchment and ultimately the integrity of the beaches.