Groundwater– surface water interaction investigations at the Boxford Research site in 2009/10

The site was originally set up as a research facility as part of the Natural Environment Research Council’s Lowland Catchment Research (LOCAR) Thematic Programme (Wheater and Peach, 2004). This was created to improve the science required to support current and future management needs for permeable lowland catchments through an integrated and multi-disciplinary experimental and modelling programme. As part of the LOCAR work an infrastructure of long-term facilities was established in three catchments, the Pang-Lambourn, Frome-Piddle and Tern (Adams et al., 2004). The Boxford Research Site was one of several sites selected in the Pang-Lambourn catchment. The site is currently the main focus for the Groundwater-Surface Water (GW-SW) Interaction Project of the British Geological Survey (BGS) Groundwater Science Program. This has significantly developed upon the existing LOCAR infrastructure and resulted in multiple recent publications including: Allen et al. (2010), Lapworth et al. (2009) and Abesser et al. (2008). Since the site was established in 2002, BGS work has predominantly been centred on Westbrook Farm. Recently, however, the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) acquired the land immediately to the south of the farm. This included approximately 500 m of additional river bank and adjacent wetlands - allowing scope for research over a greater area and more varied terrain. The CEH site is known as the Lambourn Observatory. Previous research in the observatory has focussed on the wetlands to the north (Prior and Johnes, 2002) and south (Atkins, 2005) of the Lambourn.