TWIST: Reporting live from Somerset

WTT’s Theo Pike has been busy surveying rivers in six Somerset towns for the Wild Trout Trust’s TWIST (Transforming Waterways In Somerset Towns) project.

As we’ve previously described, the TWIST project is designed to help local people get involved in looking after their local rivers with citizen science projects like riverfly monitoring and CSI Westcountry (more of this soon, we hope, as C‑19 restrictions lift safely and we can all meet on the river banks again!)

In the meantime, thanks to funding from the Environment Agency and Somerset Catchment Partnership, we’ve been able to undertake Trout in the Town type walkover surveys in the six Somerset towns and semi-urban areas which have been included in this pilot project.

Detailed reports on these walkovers have now been written up, and they’re available to download here (all in pdf format):

Each report includes ideas for projects to renaturalise the rivers we’ve looked at – improving fish passage and habitat, and even reducing flood risk by ​‘slowing the flow’ in sensible places (as you might expect from a project that’s been partly inspired by the award-winning Hills to Levels programme!)

After you’ve read the reports, and if you’d like to talk about developing projects in any of these areas, please contact Theo Pike via tpike@​wildtrout.​org