Some of the oldest cartographic names in Britain are those associated with lakes and rivers. One area that has retained many ancient names is the modern county of Cumbria. The Anglo-Saxons only reached the area at the end of the 7th century and were displaced by the Strathclyde Welsh in the 10th. Tracing the roots of these names can thus be difficult, because they include elements from several languages. In this article Glen George, Honorary Research Fellow with the FBA, explores the ancient roots of some lake and river names in Cumbria.

River restoration projects often focus on riparian management actions such as planting and fencing. Isabelle Barrett from Waterways Centre, Lincoln University, New Zealand, discusses how such projects can help rivers to recover from degradation, and explores how successful recovery of instream communities requires additional steps targeting physical habitat quality.

There is arguably no lake anywhere in the world that has greater combined economic value and scientific knowledge than Lake Naivasha, a freshwater lake at 2,000 m altitude in Kenya’s Rift Valley. Here, David Harper, FBA Fellow and Emeritus Professor at the University of Leicester, reviews the past and looks to the future of the lake and its alteration by human pressures.

Mary Kelly, Professor of Applied Freshwater Ecology at University College Dublin and FBA Fellow, introduces the Co-Centre for Climate + Biodiversity + Water, which launched in January to undertake research providing evidence and urgently needed solutions for the interlinked climate change, biodiversity loss and water quality degradation crises.

Martin Wilkes from the School of Life Sciences, University of Essex, provides a new vision for river restoration planning and ecosystem assessment, in response to new laws in England intended to stem biodiversity loss, placing rivers at the heart of national efforts to promote nature recovery.

In this article, Kate Heppell and Hannah Parry-Wilson introduce the River Chess Smarter Water Catchment project, which is funded by Thames Water and delivered by a partnership of eight stakeholder organisations who share an interest in the health of the River Chess.

By Richard Handley & Judy England

Richard Handley is the Chalk Stream Manager at the Environment Agency and President of the Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management. Judy England is a National Research Scientist within the Environment Agency’s Chief Scientist’s Group, an FBA Fellow and a member of the River Restoration Centre Advisory Board.

By Beth Mondon

Beth Mondon is a Fluvial Geomorphologist at AECOM who recently completed her PhD at the University of Southampton. Here, Beth discusses the fine sediment problem in chalk streams and key findings from her research on the development of ecologically relevant fine sediment targets.

By Louise Lavictoire & Chris West

Freshwater mussels are among the most threatened taxa in Europe with the freshwater pearl mussel (Margaritifera margaritifera) experiencing declines of over 90% during the 20th century.

Lakes in the Anthropocene: Reflections on Tracking Ecosystem Change in the Arctic, by John P. Smol

Benoît Demars reviews this important new textbook.

By Oliver Longstaffe, Andrew Apanasionok, Phillipa Bates, Lesley Rippon, Simon Rouen, Romain Sarremejane and Rachel Stubbington

The authors collaborated on a project to develop biomonitoring methods for England’s new Small Streams Network. In particular, we evaluated how well the standard 3-minute kick sampling method characterizes macroinvertebrate assemblages. Here, we report key project findings.

By Brian Knights

Riverfly Monitoring Initiative (RMI) sampling involves trained volunteer citizen scientists taking 3-minute kick samples and counting eight macroinvertebrate indicator groups.

By Stephen C. Maberly, Laurence Carvalho and Philip J Taylor

This article uses data within the UK Lakes Portal to describe the abundance, distribution and size of UK standing waters.

By Lynsey R. Harper, Bernd Hänfling and Lori Lawson Handley

Reporting on environmental DNA monitoring of Windermere, from initial ground-truthing efforts for fish to citizen science assessment of other vertebrates. Many coauthors contributed to the research spearheaded by Bernd Hänfling and Lori Lawson Handley, and the most recent eDNA survey was made possible by volunteers.

By Stewart Clarke

This autumn, I attended the Scientific Advances in River Restoration (SARR) conference hosted by the River Restoration Centre in Liverpool, UK. River restoration as we currently understand it—management interventions to modify or reinstate instream physical habitat features lost due to human modification—began in earnest in the 1990s and has matured as a practice.

By Alan Hildrew

Despite the substantial weight of evidence, garnered over a period of 50 years or more, that terrestrial organic matter is the most important source of energy fuelling many stream food webs, it is being seriously questioned by new approaches which suggest that algal carbon in headwater streams is much more important than previously thought.

The Biology and Ecology of Streams and Rivers, by Alan Hildrew and Paul Giller

Rachel Stubbington reviews this important new textbook.

By Romain Sarremejane, Teresa Silverthorn, Nans Barthélémy, Margot Jans, Amélie Truchy, Naiara López-Rojo, Arnaud Foulquier, Thibault Datry.

Rivers are the Earth’s arteries, transporting water, nutrients and organic matter from lands to seas, and contributing to key ecosystem functions associated with carbon and nutrient cycles.

By Jack A. Greenhalgh, Martin J. Genner, Gareth Jones.

New technologies, such as environmental DNA, drones, radar, camera traps and LIDAR are increasingly being used to survey ecosystems and provide new perspectives on ecosystem function and condition.

By Katrina Woodfield, Martyn Kelly, Bill Brierley & Bernadette White

Unsightly growths of filamentous algae are among the most conspicuous indicators of poor water quality and, as such, are obvious candidates for citizen scientists to use for assessing the condition of their local rivers and streams.