Professor Richard Bradier has been working on and around reservoirs as an environmental scientist for decades now, but still finds them endlessly fascinating.

Reservoirs, they're really important places.

We know, especially as we experience more droughts, the water storage capacity of reservoirs is really critical.

They're brilliant places to work because they receive water.

all the problems of the land upstream.

So if you're trying to understand how your land management is affecting the surface water body, there's no better place than a reservoir to work.

Amount of water in there is known.

That's my made-up verb, not his.

And so I asked Richard about how he came to found CRU and how peatland restoration came to play such a key role in the story.

I started working with South West Water in 2009.

The emphasis of that work was... peatland restoration, how could we re-wet blanket bogs on, begin with Exmoor but also Dartmoor and subsequently Bodmin Moor, in order to help those landscapes store more water.

The water company were interested in that because of course it costs a lot of money to treat carbon, soil, all manner of different pollutants out of water before we're able to drink it.

So it was partly that.

It was also partly all the desert-based work which had started 10 years before where I could see these heavily desertified landscapes and I thought, gosh, if we don't do something to mitigate the sort of problems we're causing in the UK, we're going to have these landscapes which basically aren't farmable.

There's no topsoil left in some of those landscapes.

We have.