On October 26-27, 2020, the first expedition (survey of a case study) was organised. The Interreg project’s Nr. LLI-533 “Joint management of Latvian – Lithuanian transboundary river and lake water bodies” (TRANSWAT) experts (Jūratė Kriaučiūnienė, Diana Šarauskienė, Diana Meilutytė-Lukauskienė, Vytautas Akstinas, Aldona Jurgelėnaitė, and Serhii Nazarenko) from the Lithuanian Energy Institute together with the project expert Tomas Virbickas (Nature Research Center) visited different reaches of the Varduva River.

This river was selected to investigate because of its vulnerability due to intensive anthropogenic activities in the river catchment. As many as five small hydropower plants are built and form a cascading regulation in the Varduva River. To implement one of the TRANSWAT project objectives (to assess and sustainably manage the water resources of rivers regulated by hydroelectric cascades), the experts identified representative reaches of the river for hydrological, hydromorphological, and ecological surveys during further project activities.