Developing a sentinel monitoring network for Scotland's rivers and lochs

• The Scottish Environment Protection Agency’s (SEPA) surveillance monitoring networks for rivers and lochs were established over a decade ago to help assess the state of Scotland’s freshwater environment and detect environmental change. This long-term monitoring is integral in formulating evidence-based policy and evaluating whether land and water management aimed at improving environmental quality is effective. • SEPA and Scottish Government have commissioned this review of the surveillance networks to better understand their national representativeness, optimal size and sampling intensities. • The review also considered new and innovative monitoring technologies, and assessed where these may help SEPA to more cost-effectively assess long-term trends in the environment. • The specific aims of this report are: (1) to assess how well the SEPA river surveillance network represents Scotland’s environment; (2) to identify possible changes in the river surveillance network to improve its representativeness; (3) to estimate the ability of the existing river and loch surveillance networks to detect long-term environmental change, and investigate how this might be affected by changes in sampling regimes; (4) to analyse environmental changes detectable since the inception of the surveillance networks; and (5) to analyse the benefits of adopting new sampling methods.