NWVMP training section
Welcome to our National Water Vole Monitoring Programme (NWVMP) training pages.
The aim of these training pages is to guide you through how you can take part in the NWVMP. You don’t need to be an expert to monitor water voles but you do need to have some training and experience of accurately identifying their field signs to take part.
For the NWVMP we are asking you to record field signs of three species. These species are:
Water vole (Arvicola amphibius)
Otter (Lutra lutra)
Mink (Neovision vision)
Once you have gone through these training pages you should feel more confident about taking part in the monitoring programme. However, we do still highly recommend that you also gain some practical experience either from attending a training course or by accompanying an experienced monitor.
Experienced volunteers may want to read through to get more of an idea about what the NWVMP aims to do, check-up certain aspects or just refresh their memory and can jump to a certain page using the menu on each page.
Get started
Visit a page in the list below to learn more. You can download a printable version on each page.
• An introduction to the NWVMP
• Planning your survey
• Searching for field signs
• Carrying out your survey
• After your survey
• More training links
Feedback – we would really value your feedback on these training pages and also on the monitoring programme. Please email any comments to watervoles@ptes.org.