WTT Blog - Tagged with Eastburn Beck

I’ve been looking forward to this moment for quite some time now…..well, at least a year. The monitoring of my pet project from pre-intervention (weir notching and removal / partial demolition over six structures) to several years post is quite revealing, and I’ll let the data do the talking.

Now, as a scientist, I know there are a few caveats associated with the figure above. But as there was no specific funding pot for the monitoring of the works for this duration, I am making the best of the situation. So, all surveys were carried out in each of the years for roughly the same amount of time (effort), over similar distances, using similar kit, and roughly the same time of year (although 2018 was a little later because of the incredibly dry spring / summer we have just experienced). Ideally, all of these parameters would have been standardised; ie identical each time.

A number of my blog posts have featured Eastburn Beck. It’s my pet project because it is the first that I cut my teeth on after moving to Yorkshire, because I live overlooking its headwaters and hence it is a very easy and accessible site for me to monitor. It is also exciting because it has ably demonstrated the value of partnership working, and how with critical mass, relatively small habitat improvements are snowballing both up and downstream from the original work plans as word spreads; this is quite typical for projects that the WTT is involved with!

Pre & post some weir notching we undertook on Eastburn Beck at Lyndhurst Wood. The channel width is narrower with more natural pool, riffle, and depositional features

Eastburn Beck is a tributary of the River Aire in Yorkshire. It is typical of a northern freestone stream / river that has had a chequered history with industrialisation, and as a consequence, it has lost some of its vitality to the constraints of walled banks and a host of weirs. The walls keep long sections straightened and have allowed housing to develop on what would have been a far more sinuous, meandering floodplain. The weirs interrupt the natural progression of pool-riffle sequences and have choked the supply of gravels downstream.

The result is a series of impounded shallow sections with uniform depth, flow, and substrate on the bed, and little in the way of cover within stream. While some of the overly wide, shallow sections with plenty of jutting stones creating small pockets of turbulence provide excellent habitat for juvenile trout (and is also favoured by the local pair of dippers), there is a distinct lack of spawning, fry and adult holding habitat.