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The River Monnow Project (Herefordshire)
The aim of the project is to improve the capacity of the river to support wild trout, grayling and other wildlife.
In essence, the impact of both over-shading and stock access, is to remove the very features of the rivers and banksides which are so important for fish and a wide range of other wildlife species.
Above all, fish require abundant, grassy bankside cover. Grasses and other plants overhanging the water edge, provide important cover for juvenile fish and encourage insects, which are important as food.
Generally, banks clad with tough perennial plants are resistant to erosion, and reduce silt entering the river by effectively narrowing the width of the channel, which causes water to scour silt out of the bed of the streams.
The Project will address these issues, in its core aims, and offer farmers in the catchment, a programme of stock fencing and coppice management of bank-side tree growth.
The work will also include some of the many small side streams which flow off the hills, as these are likely to be very important as spawning areas and as ‘nurseries’ for the main rivers.
Central to the Project will be a scientific monitoring programme, to accurately measure the impact of this work, on fish and other wildlife species.
The project is based on a number of principles which have been successfully demonstrated on many other rivers in the UK and, through the restoration of the historic trout and grayling stocks, is ultimately aimed at providing farmers with an independent and sustainable benefit from the management of an important wildlife habitat.
The WTT has contributed £18,000 of funding to this important catchment scale project.
The partners involved in the River Monnow Project are:
To visit the projects web site please click here
In 1999/2000, a detailed survey of river habitat quality of the upper Monnow catchment was undertaken by fisheries scientists from The Game Conservancy Trust.
In addition to the location of important wildlife habitats, this survey indicated the extent of river habitat degradation resulting from livestock access and allowed the extent and nature of shading by unmanaged bank side alder growth to be quantified.
Aimed at the significant improvement of a range of important wildlife habitats, the Project has employed habitat improvement techniques which require careful targeting and management to avoid concerns over local landscape changes which could possibly impact negatively in the short term, on a range of wildlife species.
These issues have been addressed during the first short coppicing season between March and April 2003 and have continued throughout the 2004 and now into the 2005 season.
Throughout its life, the project will actively seek whatever additional guidance is available to better guide its activities, in balancing the maximum long term benefits from its work with the avoidance of disturbance and damage to designated species or habitats. |
