Our Catchment Partnership - Dales to Vale River Network
Healthy Rivers, Abundant Wildlife, Valued By Communities
About us
Dales to Vale River Network (DVRN) is the name of the catchment partnership for the rivers Swale, Ure, Nidd, Ouse, Wharfe, Wiske and Foss. DVRN is also hosted by YDRT.
Formed in 2013, this partnership brings together local people, communities, organisations, charities and businesses to make decisions about river ecosystems and turn collective ambition into projects on the ground. Through working in partnership, DVRN aims to ensure that the river environments of its catchments are thriving and supporting biodiversity and the needs and wellbeing of their communities.
Connecting with a wide range of partner organisations, charities and businesses, and collaborating at scale means we can pull together overarching projects which bring positive environmental change for our rivers. Find out more here.
Working together we can achieve so much more to improve the quality, biodiversity and function of our rivers, and the resilience and wellbeing of our communities than we can independently. We need your support to help us continue to drive forward strategic, collective action across our catchments for the benefit of all.
Our Catchments
Learn more about our rivers and see what issues have been identified and what we are doing to tackle them.
As a catchment partnership, we work to the principles of:
- Using an ecosystem based, whole catchment approach
- Engaging at catchment level, with active involvement from all interested parties, including the local community
- Drawing on the high quality data, knowledge, experience and aspirations of all interested parties to drive a fuller range of measures
- Developing high quality citizen science to improve the knowledge base and drive more actions
- Linking with other partnerships and groups e.g. local nature partnerships, local enterprise partnerships, nature recovery networks, the Championing the Farmed Environment partnership, along with appropriate partner organisations including: National Parks, National Landscapes, water companies and local authorities in relation to both planning and flood risk management
- Identifying and pursuing benefits e.g. for wildlife and habitats, natural flood management (NFM), access and recreation, etc. that will arise from interventions to maximise economic benefits, possible funding sources and the quantity of interventions
- Prioritising projects that will provide the biggest range of benefits and so maximise possible funding sources
- Delivering outcomes over and above what the Environment Agency can deliver alone.
Our Focus
Improving Water Quality
Improving Connectivity and Quality of Riparian Habitat
Increase Biodiversity and Healthy Wildlife
Championing the Power of Community Action
Improving and Maintaining Access to Rivers for Recreation
Increase Climate and Flood Resilience in our communities
Since 2016 our Catchment projects have achieved:
Farmers/landowners engaged through events, workshops and farm visits
Volunteers or Citizen Scientists engaged
Kilometres of River protected or enhanced
Credit: Ousewem
Hectares of Habitat created
Kilometres of River opened up to migratory fish
Get in touch
Interested in joining our network, supporting our work or just would like to say hello?
Get in touch!
