Help revive our rivers and wetlands
Our local rivers and wetlands are failing. But with your help, we are working towards cleaner, healthier and wilder waterways for wildlife and people to enjoy for years to come.
Thanks to £10,000 match funding for our Earth Raise Living Waters appeal in April, we were able to DOUBLE your impact to make our rivers and wetlands healthier, with more than £21,000 raised so far.
A BIG thank you to everyone who has supported this appeal so far through Earth Raise. But we still need support to reach our £55k target to protect these vital habitats. Will you help us?
Let’s make a splash for nature
Healthy rivers and wetlands are essential for nature, the climate and people. These natural systems clean our water, reduce flooding, store carbon, and provide vital habitats and feeding grounds for countless species.
But across Sheffield and Rotherham, our waterways are in poor health. Of 18 local river stretches, only three are in good ecological health and none pass chemical pollution tests. Pollution, habitat loss and weakened environmental protection mean that our rivers and wetlands can no longer function as they should – and wildlife is struggling to survive.
At Sheffield & Rotherham Wildlife Trust, we believe in a future where our wetlands are healthy and full of life. A future where otters thrive, great-crested newts have plentiful ponds, and bats forage freely over open water rich with insects. We want to see water meandering naturally, sheltered by banks full of native plants and trees.
With your support, we can make this vision a reality: creating ponds for great-crested newts to breed, restoring wetter areas across our nature reserves, and re-naturalising the rivers that run through them.
Healthy wetlands are possible. We just have to choose them.
Join us in the fight to fix our rivers and wetlands and create a wilder, greener future. Thank you!
How your support can help
Together, we will act to restore wetlands and rivers at a catchment scale. This means tackling pollution, opposing damaging development, restoring habitats, embedding river health into planning, and empowering communities through citizen science. With your help, we will:
Create more wet habitat:
We will create more wetland and river habitat to support declining species such as water vole, great-crested newts, white clawed crayfish and otter.
Use Natural Flood Management (NFM) techniques
We will introduce practical conservation interventions such as leaky dams to restore, improve and create healthy wetlands and rivers.
Campaign for cleaner, healthier waters:
We will lead efforts to oppose actions that harm and pollute our water, and we will campaign for legally binding, locally targeted improvement plans for cleaner waterways across Sheffield, Rotherham and South Yorkshire.
Engage our community:
We will share our knowledge and welcome volunteers and members of the local community to take part in citizen science programmes to monitor and improve water quality.
What your donations make possible:
£25 to £100 could pay for:
- Training to support volunteers to conduct riverfly surveys, which can help us to monitor pollution in our rivers.
- The installation of a leaky dam, which helps to reduce flood risk and supports biodiversity by creating micro-habitats, such as pools and riffles.
£150 to £400 could pay for:
- The creation of more watery habitat like reedbed for harvest mice at Woodhouse Washlands nature reserve.
- Planting trees along riverbanks to help reduce flood risk and provide shade for riverside species such as water voles.
- Supporting a team of volunteers to clear invasive species from riverbanks such as Himalayan balsam
£500+ could pay for:
- The creation of new ponds for great-crested newts to breed.
- The creation of ditches and wetland scrapes and the replanting of riverbanks, which help to re-naturalise our rivers by slowing the flow, tackling erosion and creating a variety of habitats for spawning fish, dragonflies, water voles, and kingfishers.
Help us do more of this…
Boosting the harvest mouse population at Woodhouse Washlands
The harvest mouse is tiny, an adult can weigh as little as a 2p piece! It is the only British mammal to have a prehensile tail, which it uses to help it climb vegetation. Harvest mice numbers have been declining nationally because of habitat loss, changes in agricultural practices and climate change; bad news for the harvest mice that keep pests under control and also for the equally struggling predators such as owls and hawks that feed on them.
Harvest mice rely on wetlands to provide the nesting material, predator protection and foraging opportunities. At Woodhouse Washlands, one of our 15 Nature Reserves, careful wetland habitat management and reedbed creation is seeing huge results for this tiny mammal. In 2019 we recorded 27 harvest mice nests, in 2022 41 nests were found and in 2025 an amazing 215 nests were found!
Improving water quality and slowing the flow at Blacka Moor
Blacka Moor Nature Reserve is at the edge of the Peak District. A vital home for declining wildlife, and also a great site for people to visit and connect with nature; by bike, car, bus or foot. However, the A625 running alongside the reserve (that makes it easily accessible) is also damaging it. Run-off from the road pollutes the streams and bog in Blacka Moor, which then flows into the River Sheaf.
Alongside our volunteers, we have created a selection of dams, attenuation ponds and soil erosion matting, which have acted together to keep water higher up in the catchment area; resulting in a number of benefits: re-wetted an area that allows vegetation and reeds to establish that improve the water quality; slowing the flow of water to reduce risk of flooding in Sheffield; and created a wetter habitat that benefits species including curlew, bog asphodel and sphagnum.
MORE THAN £21K RAISED SO FAR
Find out more about our Living Waters work
Discover more ways that you can help, and learn about what we’re doing to raise awareness, bring people together and influence change to help our rivers and wetlands across Sheffield and Rotherham.