Data and Evidence Officer

Don Catchment Rivers Trust is an environmental charity, established to help protect and restore rivers in the River Don catchment area. This includes not just the River Don but the two main rivers that flow into the Don – the Dearne and the Rother – as well as the smaller streams which in turn run into those.

Our mission is “Working to Protect and Restore Your Rivers” and we want the rivers in our catchment to thrive.

Role Description

This is a new role at Don Catchment Rivers Trust, and an exciting opportunity to help the Trust realise its ambition of becoming more data led and improving how we use data and evidence to inform our projects and priorities.

We are looking for someone that can help us set up systems and processes for data gathering across our staff and citizen science volunteer teams and pull together existing river related data sets to create a good understanding of the health of our rivers. This understanding of the catchment will help inform priority locations and themes for projects and action.

We want the Trust’s collective knowledge to help communicate our mission to the wider public. Our new Data & Evidence Officer will create visually appealing and accessible ways of communicating data and help across the staff team to produce mapping and evidence for inclusion in reports, papers and funding applications.

As well as someone who doesn’t mind a majority of desk-based work, we want our new Data Officer to get to know the catchment by helping to conduct walk over surveys to ground truth data.

This role will be the Trust lead in working with the wider ‘data community’ including the Local Nature Recovery Strategy for South Yorkshire, the Don, Dearne and Rother Network, and the Central Rivers Trust Community of Practice.

The two-year contract length for this role takes into account that this is a new role, and as it progresses and our processes mature, it is likely to change. Alongside this, the Trusts intention is for the Data and Evidence team to grow, with a PhD student arriving in September 2026 and a citizen science/data role being hosted by DCRT for our Catchment Partnership starting in spring 2026. There are also projects on the horizon such as the Catchment Systems Thinking Co-operative (CaSTCO) that may provide further opportunities for the Trust. This will all be reviewed before the 2-year contract end to assess continuity of this role.

Role Objectives and Responsibilities

Systems and Processes

• Co-ordinating and centralising data from internal and external sources. Being the ‘go to’ person at the Trust to feed in new data sources
• Work across the staff team to create a standardised methodology for collecting walk over data and observations. i.e. what do we collect whilst out, how do we map it, how do we centralise the data and make it useful and visible
• Implement and maintain a system for centralising landowner and stakeholder contacts relating to walkovers and access permissions, that complies with GDPR
• Linking in with CaSTCo as and when it becomes alive project
• Link into the data team at Central Rivers Trust

Analysing and Evidencing

• Analysing our data for gaps and improvements
• Using data to assist the CEO and Trust Development Manager set priorities for projects
• Assisting officers across the Trust in mapping and evidencing for reports, funding bids etc.
• Working with Trust Volunteering Officers to develop citizen science projects, where community volunteers may be able to address important gaps in data

Communicating Data

• Using data to produce external comms where data visualisation could help with messaging

Funding commitments:

Part of the funding for this role is coming from specific sources, so your first main tasks are outlined below. This will be an excellent opportunity to get to know the catchment and meet your data peers:

• Part of the funding for this role is to carry out walkover surveys to ground truth a dataset. This will require walk over surveys, updating the data with our findings, and using it to prioritise projects to move forward to feasibility.
• Be the lead person at DCRT for liaising with the Local Nature Recovery Strategy. Including attending workshops and meetings, analysing the LNRS report when available to understand gaps in the water species data, and reviewing if the gaps could be filled with existing data. Feed into the Trusts citizen science data collection if suitable methods for collecting data are available, and maintain a communications link for this with the LNRS

Hours: 32 hours (4 days). We may be able to accommodate requests for this role to be full time.