The Riverfly Partnership: a year of collaboration, conferences, and citizen science
17 December, 2025
2025 has been another fantastic and busy year for the Riverfly Partnership, here we catch up with the Riverfly Partnership team to find out more.
We’ve seen the volunteer network grow, reaching new geographical locations with new groups coming aboard from the rivers of Cornwall to the west coast of Wales, over to the Northern Ireland and all the way up to the Highlands of Scotland. Our geographical reach is larger than ever with over 700 rivers now being monitored by our 2000+ volunteers.
Geographical reach of the Riverfly Partnership is larger than ever with over 700 rivers now being monitored by our 2000+ volunteers!
This year has been about offering our volunteers continuity and stability, offering a good foundation and building on last year’s growth. The team at RPHQ have supported new groups setting up, the accreditation of many new tutors and kept all our training materials and processes up to date. We’ve refined our offer for socials and our newsletters, sharing relevant news from around the network. We’ve strengthened our connections with the Environment Agency, as both a long-term funder and supporter of Riverfly, by showcasing our Ecology Contacts from the Agency and highlighting case studies with positive outcomes from different regions around England.
We love to share news from around the network to highlight how Riverfly methods are helping citizens protect rivers, how it helps to inform restoration efforts, how it is part of a suite of initiatives that help community groups improve their local environment. We also found a little time to record a video detailing exactly what Riverfly monitoring entails, which has proven very useful to share with new enquiries and we’ve received great feedback from it.
Our Targets and Triggers project
We’ve continued to work collaboratively with partner organisations and thanks to some CaSTCo funding we’ve been able to bring our Targets and Triggers project to fruition, working with analysts from the Rivers Trust, partners at the EA and FBA fellows. This project is going to give a standardised way of setting triggers across the board and show volunteers what target score they could see at their site if all the conditions are good. We will share more on this in early 2026 once the ‘behind the scenes’ work at Cartographer is complete.
Updates from RPHQ
This year our RPHQ team of three altered slightly at the end of summer, with Beth Korab going on maternity leave and welcoming a healthy baby boy just a few days after leaving work, we look forward to welcoming Beth back in early summer 2026. In the meantime, we’ve had the pleasure of welcoming Emma Kelly onboard part time, she is also the Lakefly officer at the FBA and has had a busy few months with lots of groups getting trained to take part in the Lakefly pilot. Ellen Burton has been very busy learning R and has been making some changes to our monthly data reports and preparing for the annual report summing up all the fantastic surveying our volunteers have done in 2025.
Riverfly Photography Competition & Calendar
The Riverfly Photography Competition made a return this year, the last one was in 2016, and we were inundated with hundreds of fantastic entries during the spring and early summer months. It made the job very tricky for our three judges, FBA Executive Director Simon Johnson, Riverfly co-chairs Louise Lavictoire and Steve Brooks but a winner and two runners up were chosen. You can see the wonderful photographs here in our gallery and you can also buy one of our 2026 calendars featuring twelve of these magnificent pictures.
Cased caddis by David Warriner (left), and riverfly photo by Andrew Gibson (right) feature in the Riverfly Partnership Calendar 2026.
Riverfly Conference at the Natural History Museum
Dr. Josh Cohen presenting a keynote on Riverkinship (left), and Trine Bregstein from the Riverfly Partnership (right) speaking at the Riverfly Conference in 2025.
This autumn saw the return of our National Conference, the 6th one we’ve held now, where we came together from all four home nations to discuss all things Riverfly and Citizen Science. It was a fantastic day online and in-person at the Flett Theatre in the Natural History Museum, we had ten speakers giving updates from their geographical regions, on their projects featuring the three modes of monitoring – RMI, Urban and Extended – and were treated to a thought-provoking keynote from Dr. Josh Cohen on Riverkinship. If you want to catch up on this you can find the recording on YouTube and the presentation slides on our website.
Merry Christmas from the Riverfly Partnership!
All that remains is for us to say a huge thank you to all our volunteers, partners, funders and host for a great year and wish you all a delightful holiday season!
Heartfelt thanks to the Environment Agency and Esmée Fairbairn Foundation for being our generous funders and supporting the work we do.
“All that remains is for us to say a huge thank you to all our volunteers, partners, funders and host for a great year and wish you all a delightful holiday season!”
