Clean water projects

With our thousands of kilometres of coastline, Ireland has relatively few records of intertidal and coastal marine species.  

We lack a strong tradition of the public recording intertidal species, which is why we are looking for volunteers like you, whether you are a surfer, angler, walker, shellfish farmer, diver or amateur naturalist, to take some time to Explore Your Shore and help us record our intertidal species. 

Explore Your Shore is a citizen science project that focuses on increasing our knowledge of the distribution of our intertidal species and exploring their potential as bio-indicators of water quality and climate change.  Explore Your Shore also highlights actions we can all take to tackle water pollution and climate change. 

This project was developed and launched in partnership between the National Biodiversity Data Centre and the EPA. 

By becoming an AMBER citizen scientist you can help reconnect European rivers, track barriers, and learn about their impacts!  

Rivers rank among some of the most threatened ecosystems in the world due in part to the fragmentation of habitats caused by tens of thousands of dams and weirs.  

Some barriers are old and out of use, but others provide energy, water, fishing or leisure opportunities.  

Your help by recording barriers with the Barrier Tracker app is vital to map all barriers in European rivers and build the first European Barrier Atlas. This project continues the work carried out in Ireland by the Reconnect project.

Clean Coasts engages communities in the protection of Ireland’s beaches, seas and marine life. The programme is operated by An Taisce and Clean Coasts creates a tangible and immediate improvement to Ireland’s coastal environment through:  

• Organising hundreds of beach clean-ups each year. 
• Mobilising thousands of volunteers, removing large quantities of marine litter from our coastline. 
• Promoting and facilitating coastal clean-ups and marine litter surveys. 
• Clean Coasts has grown over the years and now includes two main national clean-up drives. 

The Local Authority Waters Programme (LAWPRO) is working with anglers in the border region to monitor Lough Eske, Lough Melvin and Lough Sheelin using innovative citizen science techniques. 

The Border Community Water Officer team of LAWPRO worked with the EPA, Local Authorities, the Northern Ireland Environment Agency and Inland Fisheries Ireland and together launched a pilot project in May 2019.  

Citizen scientists collect data on the following parameters: 

• Wind Speed 
• Presence of Algae 
• Dissolved Oxygen (mg/l) pH 
• Electrical Conductivity 
• Temperature 
• Observations at Sample Location 
• Secchi Depth 
• Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) 

This project is ongoing - for further information contact The Local Authority Waters Programme