Our Water Team

Wiltshire is home to some of the world’s most precious freshwater habitats, including a significant portion of the planet’s remaining chalk streams. It is the job of our water team to protect and restore these important wetlands, rivers and streams.

Often working beyond our nature reserves, the Water Team provide technical expertise and deliver projects to enhance, protect and restore our county’s rivers and wetlands. From the urban channels of the River Biss in Trowbridge to the internationally significant chalk river, the Hampshire Avon, our work is about creating ecological resilience in these freshwater habitats.

What We Do

Our team leads on a range of projects focused on:

• River Restoration  - We design and deliver technical interventions—such as re-meandering straightened channels, introducing woody debris, and creating wetland scrapes—to restore natural flow and habitat diversity.
• Nature-Based Solutions - By creating features such as reedbeds and floodplains, we help filter pollutants in run-off water, and slow the flow of water which reduces downstream flood risks and improves water quality.
• Species Recovery: We work to protect species like the water vole, brown trout and salmon by removing invasive non-native species (INNS) and improving in-channel habitats. 
  
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• We believe that healthy, thriving waterways don’t just benefit the natural world but the community as well. Our Team works with local people to monitor and improve our rivers.
• Through our Water Guardians scheme, we train a network of volunteers to monitor our watercourses, identifying pollution incidents and testing water quality.
• We also have a growing number of Riverfly Monitors – an initiative where volunteers record levels of invertebrate species using a method developed by The Riverfly Partnership. Kick samples are taken and the abundance of eight key groups of invertebrates, including mayflies and freshwater shrimps, are used to calculate a score.  This provides essential data on water health, ensuring our conservation efforts are backed by science.
  
  Whether we are advising landowners on regenerative farming or wading into the Wylye to restore a gravel riffle, our goal is simple: to ensure Wiltshire’s waters are cleaner and more resilient for the nature and people.