Collecting data to inform our environmental work: a day in the life of a catchment scientist

I’m Eve and I’m one of the Sussex hub’s Catchment Scientists at South East Water. My role involves taking water samples from our sites in the Ouse, Cuckmere, Wallers Haven and Seaford catchments. This is both from surface water, so rivers and lakes, and groundwater from boreholes. I then analyse the results to help the team better understand water pollution issues in the area.

On the road

My day starts by heading to the office to pick up a van and the equipment, bottles and labels I need to store and identify the samples I take. I will then set off on my route, stopping off at key sites to take samples. Depending on the issues we are investigating as part of our statutory environmental improvement work, the bottles will be labelled up to test for things like the presence of algae, floating sediment, or pollutants such as nitrates.

My journey takes me to some beautiful locations and I have loved seeing how the countryside changes through the seasons. The weather can cause some issues, and the flooding experienced at the beginning of the year made the job challenging to say the least! I’ll often bump into people as I am taking samples and many will ask what I’m up to. I enjoy speaking to people about what I’m doing and the work of the environment team in protecting our water resources.

Once I have finished sampling I will drop them off to a storage location and process them in our sample manager software, so they are ready for the couriers to pick them up and take them to our lab in Farnborough. I also collect samples for the University of Brighton who are working with us on some of our catchment projects and so I also arrange to meet them to hand over the samples.

Using the data to inform our work

I am typically out sampling three days a week. The other two are spent in the office analysing the results that have come back. Samples are taken from sites every two weeks which means we can build a picture of what is happening in the catchment, patterns relating to the time of year or weather. It also helps to identify the areas within a catchment we should focus our efforts on in order to improve water quality. This could be offering advice to farmers and landowner on improving soil quality so they need less fertiliser on their crops which can end up in the water course, or using cover crops which help prevent soil washing into rivers and streams during heavy rainfall.

Although we do remove unwanted substances during the treatment process, preventing pollution at source helps us keep bills low, reduces our carbon footprint and protects our local environment for future generations.

For more information about our environment work, visit our environment page