Dippers as Bioindicators of River Health: a survey of the River Frome catchment in Gloucestershire - Dr Mark O’Connell
Dr Mark O’Connell is Senior Lecturer in Practical Ecology at the University of Gloucestershire. He has 30 years’ experience in using research to underpin conservation action. He has a particular interest in avian ecology and the use of GIS to understand species distributions.
Dippers are highly sensitive to changes in water acidity and pollution, and are therefore an important bio monitoring species for freshwater habitats.
Dr Connell said: “The River Frome and its tributaries are over 90km in length and there is a lot of development in the catchment. We need to know if that change is going to damage biodiversity. It is impossible to monitor everything, so instead we use bioindicators, and an excellent indicator of river health is the Dipper. Dippers feed on water invertebrates, and pollution can affect their populations. This in turn causes changes in Dippers’ breeding outputs (number of eggs and successful chicks). A healthy river is indicated by a healthy Dipper population.”
“One of the aims of the 2025 pilot project is to set a baseline for Dipper populations in the Stroud Valleys because you’ve then got something to measure change against.”