WTT Blog - Tagged with Ribble

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

Connectivity is a recurrent theme of my blog posts. Last year I wrote about plans for notching some of the redundant low mill weirs on a tributary of the River Aire, local to me. Those plans will come to fruition in the next few weeks as Pete Turner (Environment Agency) and I have had our bespoke environmental permit consented to progress the works, so I’ll report back to show you how the channel is evolving. I also wrote about making connections and how Mike Forty’s PhD research with Ribble Rivers Trust had thrown up some really interesting results, especially regarding the importance of free movement for precocious parr; the published work is available here.

To communicate the worth of habitat restoration work (in supporting the Ecosystem Service approach & Natural Capital principles) to the wider public and to potential future funders, and thus maintain, increase and maximise the potential impact, there is an urgent need for some simple and accessible assessments that a broad audience can appreciate. I have proposed to use the concept of the food web in this context because: a) the knock-on effects of habitat degradation translate into food web alterations very quickly; and b) the food web is recognised by a broad swathe of society (and from a very early age). Hence, measures of food webs can be used as an engagement & educational tool that will increase the understanding and value of restoration projects, as well as a tangible and effective measure for funding applications.

Man-made barriers, obstacles, call them what you will, are commonplace along our waterways as we have (typically) in the past tried to harness or control the flow of water for our own use. Some of these installations were incredibly insensitive to the local and more widely spread ecology and physical processes in rivers and streams, not just the fish that might want free passage both up and downstream at all life stages, and in all seasons.

I recently spent an afternoon with Mike Forty, a PhD student registered at Durham University, and based with the Ribble Rivers Trust. His work, using telemetry to assess the efficiency with which fish can pass obstacles, has been enlightening, and some of the statistics he can rattle off are mind-boggling. His work was featured in the presentation that Jack Spees (Director of RRT) gave at our recent WTT Gathering and captured on video here. For example, the low cost baffle system that was installed on a previously almost impassable weir on Swanside Beck (picture to right) can now be ascended in 23 seconds (according to one sea trout), and several resident brown trout have been up and down it numerous times!