Trout in the Town:

With the terrible impacts of flooding still very fresh in the memories of the electorate - being seen to be boldly meeting this challenge by deploying machinery to master nature could be a great way to win votes. However, the evidence tells us that overall flood risk can be increased by dredging (by passing the problem downstream) and could not have prevented the recent extensive floods that had such terrible impacts. That is just considering the flood risk angle - the problem with dredging is that it carries a lot of additional, automatic and unavoidable costs that can impact on our environment (which we have plenty of selfish reasons to protect - even if we have no regard for nature for its own sake). Please consider reading this balanced report from Blueprint for Water: Dredging up Trouble See also these easily digestible videos on a previous post: Must-Watch Videos on Floodwater Management Please don't let us sleepwalk into wasting money on an approach that does n...

As Joint professional category winners in the 2014 WTT Conservation awards (Sponsored by Thames Water) - the Eastridge Estate habitat works project has a lot of interesting things to share. Video is often far more efficient at conveying these messages than lots of technical documentation: The video above shows some of the works undertaken over this substantial section of the River Kennet which not only created a lot of new spawning, juvenile and adult trout habitat (and a lot of additional river corridor flora and fauna) - but connected huge sections of upstream and downstream habitat that had previously been kept separate for fish migration. The project had to improve habitat and reduce long impounded (dammed) sections whilst at the same time retaining enough vertical head of water in certain places to be able to flood the SSSI water meadows adjacent to the river. They did this by introducing a series of gravel riffles to retain enough head - but to energise and diversify the fl...

We will soon be able to bring you a video that details just one of the dozen entries to this year's hard-fought conservation awards. The standards of works submitted were incredibly high - with many projects that could have easily taken the winning spots in previous years of competition. http://www.flyfishing.co.uk/news/fly-fishing-features/features/fishinguk/6862-chalkstreams-%E2%80%93-it%E2%80%99s-looking-good.html