The South East Rivers Trust (SERT) is doing some work to ground-truth chalk streams in the south east (pictured above is the Nail Bourne, a tributary of the Little Stour). They’ve created a map of the recorded high and low-certainty SE chalk streams and are asking people to feedback on this: https://www.southeastriverstrust.org/help-us-identify-all-south-east-chalk-streams/
This links closely with work I’ve recently been doing with NE to identify all the country’s chalk streams. Even as we finished we were aware that even though we had tried our best to find and identify everything, there were most likely other valuable sites we had missed, especially amongst the more complex network of scarp-face, spring-line streams.
I have already posted HERE about making contributions / updates to the Natural England map. But with SERT collating efforts in their patch, you might also want to take a look at their portal.
Chalk-Streams 
Good morning,I am very concerned about the state of our declining environment / planet and the way humans are treating the waterways and especially our chalk streams. My concerns have actually urged me to start removing as much as possible, the amount of plastic and other non -natural items from the River Wye, mainly between Bourne End and Wooburn Park, in addition, I have attempted a number of areas within Loudwater area. Due to my medical history, I do not enter the river but have to use telescopic poles, grappling hooks and landing nets to retrieve the items that have been fly tipped / thrown into the river. I have been carrying out this cleanup over the last few years at monthly / bi-monthly intervals, resulting in some 80 + black bags so far, the mini weirs are a great help with floating items as they obviously have a catchment area of swirling water. In addition to my actions, my wife has setup an environmental group, mainly litterpicking in and around Bourne End, the group is on Facebook under the name of LitterBlitz and contains example photos of the group and what I have collected from the river Wye. My wife and I, (both Rotarians) recently carried out the Thames 21 Plasticblitz task with the help of fellow Rotarians, LitterBlitz members, general public and the local Parish Council, who collected the waste. The task was to cover an area that I had been unable to cleanup for various reasons. The 250 Metre stretch of the Wye resulted in 16 black bags of waste taken from the river and an additional 11 bags being collected from the banks and surrounding areas. My personal clean-up’s will continue, but are there any future plans, etc for helping the urban areas of the River Wye, we all know people can be lazy, uncaring and disgusting, using the Wye as an “out of sight, out of mind” option to their personal waste. Please view the facebook (Litterblitz) page and you will see my attempts at cleaning up the Wye. Kind regards Barry Cross
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Hi Barry,
If you haven’t already done so, I suggest that you should reach out to both ‘Friends of the Wye’ (https://revivethewye.org.uk/friends-of-the-wye/) and ‘Chiltern Rangers’ (https://chilternrangers.co.uk/). Both organisations run similar volunteer work to your group in addition to other restoration and conservation work on the whole of the River Wye. They also have volunteers who are experienced at working in the river when required (and safe to do so), who could assist you on some occasions if needed. In fact only this week I was involved with Chiltern Rangers on a project to install new and update existing flow deflectors in the river at Wooburn Park (still to be completed). This work is in conjunction with the ‘Chiltern Chalk Streams Project’ (https://www.chilternstreams.org/), who are also planning additional improvement work on the Wye.
Regards,
Bill.
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