As the five-year, cross-border Source to Tap project successfully concludes, a new website has just been launched to help inform and educate future source water improvement projects.

Launched in 2017, Source to Tap was a €4.9M cross-border partnership project aimed at improving water quality in rivers and lakes in the Derg and Erne catchments.

- Learning for Water: Education

- Love Your Water: Citizen Science

placeholder image — The River Derg. Picture: Michael Cooper

- Farming For Water: Agriculture

- Forests For Water: Forestry

- Peatlands for Water: Peatland restoration

The newly launched, easy-to-navigate website site hosts a selection of valuable resources, including videos, guides, education packages, information leaflets and reports which document the learning and insights gained over five years of the project. The website brings together the Source to Tap approach to sustainable, cost-effective catchment management, which delivered a ‘watershed moment’ in drinking water protection on the island of Ireland.

The website has been designed to make the outputs of the Source to Tap project accessible to everyone, allowing stakeholders across the water utility, scientific, policy, community and education sectors to benefit from the information generated by this innovative and ground-breaking project.

This website invites those with a professional, practical or academic interest to explore what Source to Tap has delivered, including the key outcomes and learnings from the project and how this can be replicated and applied in other river catchments.

From the website home page (www.sourcetotap.eu) users can choose to access information from one of three entry ‘portals’:

- Water Professionals and Land Manager

- Farmers and Landowners

- Educators and Citizen Scientists

In each portal, information from each of the relevant five themes of the project is organised for easy navigation and access.

Users can browse technical reports/scientific information such as detailed reports on the peatlands and forestry for water pilot studies or view supporting resources, including overview/summary documents and guides, videos and other downloadable resources such as educational and teaching materials.

The site also gives access to videos of presentations and talks from the Source to Tap closing conference, which was held in Lough Erne Resort in Fermanagh in May 2022.

Whether you just want to scratch the surface of integrated catchment management for source drinking water protection or immerse yourself in the science and economics behind our approach, the Source to Tap legacy website has something for everyone.

Source To Tap was funded by the EU’s INTERREG VA programme managed by the Special EU Programmes Body (SEUPB) together with funding from the Department for Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (DAERA) in Northern Ireland and the Department for Housing, Local Government and Heritage (DHLGH) in Ireland.

The Source to Tap project partners are: NI Water, Irish Water, Agri-Food & Bioscience Institute, The Rivers Trust, Ulster University and East Border Region.