River Invertebrates Show That European Freshwater Habitats Have Stopped Improving

Freshwater habitats have been harmed by pollution. People tried to fix this problem by reducing pollution from cities and farms, but we do not know if these efforts worked. To find out if they did, a group of scientists caught small animals, called invertebrates, from rivers across many European countries. Invertebrates can tell us if a river is polluted because we catch many different invertebrates in unpolluted rivers, but only a few in polluted rivers. If more invertebrates are caught each year, it means rivers are getting better. Researchers caught more invertebrates during the 1990s and 2000s. This was good news because it showed that reducing pollution helped many rivers. However, they did not catch more invertebrates in the 2010s. This means rivers stopped getting better, maybe because of other problems we have not fixed, like climate change. More work is therefore needed to help freshwater habitats improve again.