Our fantastic Essex Wildlife Trust volunteer River Wardens were very busy in 2016, and the project has been more successful than we could have hoped for in such a short space of time.
The group has gone above and beyond what we asked of them, by getting together to organise litter picks, invasive species removal and even organising social events such as canoe trips along their local river! The project has been so successful in fact that we thought that our volunteers deserved a bit more recognition, so we decided to nominate them for the UK Awards for Biological Recording and Information Sharing’s inaugural Lynne Farrell Group Award. We were delighted that the NBN judges agreed with us, so late last year two of our volunteer wardens, Laura Millar and Mary Tayler, accompanied us to Edinburgh to receive the award at the National Museums Scotland. We were told that the group category received more nominations than any of the other awards, so to win the inaugural award in this category is an outstanding achievement.
Our volunteers were thrilled to receive this award, and the attention the award has focused on the project has also been beneficial to our partner organisations, and helped to raise our profile as an organisation that ‘gets the job done’. Shortly after nominating our wardens for this award we lost the member of staff coordinating the project, but winning the award has helped us to make the case for recruiting a new coordinator to drive the project forward and prevent it from losing momentum.
Thank you to everyone who has been involved in making the project a success, in particular to all of our fantastic River Warden Volunteers for helping us to get this national recognition for our volunteer work. Our new River Wardens’ Assistant, Claire Branch, will be taking the project forwards in 2017 so keep an eye on the Essex Rivers Hub website for future developments!
Written by Dr Lorna Shaw, Biological Records Officer, Essex Wildlife Trust
Find out more about all the 2016 UK Award winners
BBC Wildlife also featured the River Wardens as a result of their award.
