As recently as 2019, the Middle Severn, stretching from Shrewsbury down to Worcester, was an attractive river with wall-to-wall water crowfoot Batrachium providing a carpet of white flowers in early summer. Six years on, the flowers have disappeared – nobody knows why beyond speculation, but it might suggest that there is an underlying problem.
The Middle Severn is ranked by the Environment Agency (EA) as being in ‘Good Ecological Status’ on all measures. In this article, Roger Deane, Mike Averill, and Trevor Ponman, investigate whether this is truly the case and more broadly whether environmental data that is being collected and analysed in a way that tells us the truth about rivers.