Skip to main content

Volunteer Action on Urban River Corridor Biodiversity: It works!



Back in 2010 the photo above is what an area of Sheffield's urban River Don looked like. Later that year, local Trout in the Town group "SPRITE" organised a day that combined their own volunteer force with a group of University of Sheffield staff that had been released for the day to contribute to volunteer works in the local area. The volunteers cleared a substantial section of the urban Don of all the balsam that they could get their hands on. You can see that, where the balsam had been removed, there was not much else in the way of vegetation that was able to survive...




Then in 2011, as the video below shows, one of SPRITE's activities was to follow up on previous clearance work by removing any re-growth of balsam and then to consolidate that with sowing of a seed-mix of species native to the Don corridor.

SPRITE Winter Working Parties from Paul Gaskell on Vimeo.


Now, in 2014, the photographs below clearly tell the story of how local volunteer action has significantly improved the floral (and associated faunal) biodiversity within the river corridor. These benefits, initiated in 2010 have persisted at least 4 years and counting...Just a small amount of continuing ongoing care will readily control any re-establishment attempts made by balsam seed being imported into this reach. REMEMBER - work that has been noted in this blog previously (http://www.sciencecodex.com/global_plant_diversity_hinges_on_local_battles_against_invasive_species-105553) tells us that winning local-scale battles to preserve native biodiversity adds up to a significant conservation of overall biodiversity at landscape scales too. The work to control local patches of balsam, and its results show below, on the Don show that whilst the overall ideal scenario would be to systematically tackle all invasive plants from the top of the catchment downstream, there are still significant benefits to tackling local patches. This is true even with a future potential for re-invasion since there is still a substantial benefit to be had during the period between clearance and re-invasion (in this case at least 4 years)...AND it is much easier to "stay on top of" picking off a low number of re-invading plants than the initial great effort required to clear a large infestation that has already got out of control.

See the pictures below and ask yourself whether, even though there are sources of balsam upstream, the effort has been worth it so far...




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why Presume to Remove Weirs? (with River Dove Case Study)

Weirs and the Backwards Ways that Rivers Work One of my favourite sayings on river restoration is a mangled quote from a movie "... boxing is an unnatural act. Everything in boxing is backwards: sometimes the best way to deliver a punch is to step backwards...but step back too far and you ain't fighting at all ". So my mangled version starts out "Everything in rivers is backwards...". Basically, I never seem to run out of new examples of "what SEEMS to happen in a river is actually the complete opposite of what really happens". The rest of this article looks at many of the "backwards" things about weirs and rivers - and finishes off with a real-world case-study that is playing out right now on the River Dove . One spoiler alert is that, from an ecological point of view, it is almost always safe to assume that: The best biological outcome for a river is the removal of some or all of an artificial weir.  Now, I don't exp...

The Wild Trout Trust: A Film by Chalkstream Fly

Here is a great short piece that captures what the work of the Wild Trout Trust is all about. It was made for (and broadcast on) the very first "World Fishing Day" - a 24hr live fishing programme created by FishingTV.com . It features TV personalities (and WTT President & Vice President respectively!) Jon Beer and Matthew Wright as well as Director of the Trust, Shaun Leonard. You can see more work by the film-makers on Chalkstreamfly.co.uk  and, of course, you can join the Wild Trout Trust here: WTT Membership Paul Gaskell (Trout in the Town Conservation Officer)

First Survey Record of Wild Trout Returning to Lyme Brook Habitat Works Site!

You may have seen the first three phases of works on the middle reaches of the Lyme Brook (shown in previous blogs Here and Here ) from project works that began in 2015... Well although the first surveys after that work found some nice coarse fish populations - there was no cold hard evidence that any trout had found the newly-improved habitat...Until now! EA Midlands Survey Teams reportedly found "More than one...but less than five" wild trout like this one on Sept. 7th 2017 I received a phone call today from Matt Lawrence who is the EA's Catchment Host for the Trent Valley Catchment Partnership (with key partners Groundwork West Midlands and the Wild Trout Trust who conceived and delivered the habitat works). Matt told me that he'd had some exciting preliminary reports from a EA Midlands fisheries surveys team. Their survey on 7th September had caught several wild trout as part of their sample on the habitat works site. These are the first modern records ...