UK lowland river chemistry
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Chemical analysis of stream, river and rainfall samples for lowland rivers in the UK. The data are uncensored and provide a basis for research purposes, and must be viewed in this light. Information on analytical methodologies is available, including detection limits, from which the user can choose how the data might be interpreted. The basins studied were the Tweed, Wear, Humber, Great Ouse and Thames. One tributary (the Teviot) and two main-stem sites were monitored in the Tweed Catchment. One site around two-thirds down the catchment of the River Wear was monitored. Humber Basin Monitoring was undertaken for all the tributaries especially near their downstream limits. The Great Ouse was monitored around half way down the catchment. The Thames catchment was monitored upstream and downstream of sewage inputs to the river, prior and post effluent stripping of phosphorus. This work formed part of a major UK initiative introduced in the early 1990s, the Land Ocean Interaction Study, LOIS, to examine water, chemical and sediment fluxes from the eastern UK rivers to the North Sea. The entire LOIS core monitoring data, including a wider range of determinands, is available from EIDC. As part of this and subsequent work, the initiative was extended to examine a range of catchment basins, from rural to agricultural and industrial/urban impacted ones.
Publication date: 2010-12-31
View numbers valid from 01 June 2023 Download numbers valid from 20 June 2024 (information prior to this was not collected)
Format
Comma-separated values (CSV)
Spatial information
Study area
Spatial representation type
Tabular (text)
Spatial reference system
OSGB 1936 / British National Grid
Temporal information
Temporal extent
1993-09-07 to 2009-10-27
Provenance & quality
Water quality was monitored for eastern UK rivers (Tweed and Humber) as part of the Land Ocean Interaction Study, LOIS, in the early 1990s. Subsequently, the monitoring was transferred to the Wear, Great Ouse and most extensively to the Thames Basin and for the latter, rainfall was also measured . The chemical analysis undertaken within the LOIS programme was undertaken within CEH laboratories at Wallingford (then Institute of Hydrology), Ferry House (Institute of Freshwater Ecology, Windermere) and associated CEH laboratories at York and Stirling. The later analysis was undertaken by the CEH Wallingford Laboratories with phosphorus data for the Wear was measured in collaboration with Professor Brian Whitton at the University of Durham. All data collated by Colin Neal of CEH Wallingford
Licensing and constraints
Related
This dataset is included in the following collections
Water quality and biological data from the River Thames and its tributaries (1997 to 2013)
Supplemental information
Neal, C., Bowes, M., Jarvie, H. P., Scholefield, P., Leeks, G., Neal, M., Rowland, P., Wickham, H., Harman, S., Armstrong, L., Sleep, D., Lawlor, A. and Davies, C. E. (2012), Lowland river water quality: a new UK data resource for process and environmental management analysis. Hydrol. Process., 26: 949-960.
Colin Neal, Phil Rowland, Paul Scholefield, Colin Vincent, Clive Woods, Darren Sleep, The Ribble/Wyre observatory: Major, minor and trace elements in rivers draining from rural headwaters to the heartlands of the NW England historic industrial base, Science of The Total Environment, Volume 409, Issue 8, 15 March 2011, Pages 1516-1529, ISSN 0048-9697.
Correspondence/contact details
UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology
enquiries@ceh.ac.uk
Other contacts
Custodian
NERC EDS Environmental Information Data Centre
info@eidc.ac.uk
Publisher
NERC Environmental Information Data Centre
info@eidc.ac.uk