Ric Cooper helps run The Cleddau Project in Pembrokeshire where a group of volunteers are working to restore the county’s main rivers – the Western and Eastern Cleddau – back to good health.<\/p>\n
“I live on the estuary and like others had become increasingly distraught with the state of the river,” he said.<\/p>\n
“It would often smell of sewage and sometimes slurry, and the life in the river was deteriorating before our eyes.<\/p>\n
“We have green algal banks, we have what they can algal mats in the summer months which are due to excess nutrients in the water, sunlight and warm temperatures.”<\/p>\n
The condition of the river and marine environment are “very linked”, Mr Cooper explained, but he felt the impact on the coast and sea were “almost like a forgotten story”.<\/p>\n
“There hasn’t been the same pressure to improve things for the estuary as there has been for the freshwater Cleddau.”<\/p>\n
He said the group, which has spent the last year coordinating a citizen science project monitoring water quality at 49 sites, involving 100 volunteers, was very much looking forward to reading NRW’s reports.<\/p>\n
“We want it to be highlighted that this water body is failing, it’s in a bad way and then the powers that be will have to decide what can be done about it.<\/p>\n
“We’re hoping this catalyses more action.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ric Cooper helps run The Cleddau Project in Pembrokeshire where a group of volunteers are working to restore…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":211582,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3843],"tags":[728,70,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-211581","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-environment","9":"tag-science","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114740846019749338","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211581"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211581\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/211582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}