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Finding out about rivers

River Itchen watermeadows, Winchester, Hampshire, England

Last updated: 4 January 2011.

Please note that this page is now archived. A number of the links are broken and we are very unlikely to revisit or update them. However, you can always track down an old page by copying its name into a search engine and looking for its new location.

Is there anything more inspiring than a river? When the low sun shatters on the water or a kingfisher flashes blue, straight past you? Here at the UK Rivers Network, we love rivers and we do our best to make sure our rivers stay the way we'd all like to see them. Whether you're into fishing, canoeing, kayaking, or just walking your dog along the river bank, we hope you love rivers too.

Part of our mission involves defending rivers against the things that threaten them. But it's just as important to help people learn about rivers and the things we can do to protect them. So welcome to our general page of river links—your starting point for finding out a bit more about rivers.

The beautifully clear chalk-stream River Test, Hampshire. Photo by: UK Rivers Network

Contents: what's on this page

Start here

Background information

Explainthatstuff's introduction to rivers is a good starting point for students.

The following regularly updated sections of the DMOZ/ODP web directory are good starting points for finding out about rivers and water issues:

Also try Yahoo! Society and Culture > Environment and Nature > Water Resources > Rivers and Streams

Cool stuff for schools

Here are some good introductory articles and websites on rivers—they're ideal for school projects!

Organizations and campaign groups

UK community-based river groups

For our current list of UK groups, please take a look at our network page

Worldwide community-based river groups

River restoration

Fish conservation

We've moved the links from this section to a much-expanded page exclusively about fishing.

Recreational water use

Rivers of the world

Around the UK

Map of UK rivers

Sorry, we are no longer aware of a website that shows a complete map of UK rivers. However, the Britannia website has a pretty good map of the major British rivers and even draws a picture of them for you!

Comprehensive list of UK rivers

We've long planned to create a comprehensive directory of UK rivers but, since we first set up our website, Wikipedia has appeared! There's now a Wikipedia page called List of rivers of the United Kingdom, which lists the 20 or so longest rivers. This page also links to pages that attempt to list all the rivers in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. By the nature of Wikipedia, this is a somewhat incomplete resource at the moment—but give it chance and it should build into an excellent guide to our rivers in the next few years. Do contribute information if you can:

UK

England

Ireland

Northern Ireland

Scotland

Wales

Articles about rivers

General

Human water use issues

Dams

River pollution

Note that there are hundreds more pollution-related links on our Water pollution page.

Rivers and climate change

Habitats and species

News stories

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