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TRUST CATCHMENT MANAGER’S UPDATE
In between moving offices and recruiting new staff for the RiverLife: Almond & Avon project, the core work of the Trust continued over the summer with electrofishing across the district to ensure we can evaluate the fish populations, meeting with groups and owners to discuss issues and find solutions, as well as dealing with a number of high level consultations ensuring that the proposals do not have a negative impact on fish or their environment.
With the RiverLife project now in delivery stage, we are working on a number of other projects with partners to get funding for delivery and as these progress we will provide more details but they cover many parts of the District. The consequences of Brexit have not yet been fully felt and this will influence where and what type of funding is available. We are pleased to have finally got confirmation of funding from the Environment Cooperation Action Fund (ECAF) for Freshwater Pearl Mussel work on the Teith system and Bearford Burn Sediment Management which is a tributary of the Tyne. However, there is a possibility that there will be no further rounds of funding from ECAF, LEADER or Green Infrastructure. With SEPA WEF having also had to change its priorities and the way it intends to deliver the work required under River Basin Management Plans, it is not going to be easy to develop larger projects. The Trust is still looking at options to work in partnership with others to continue to make the improvements required to our fish habitats and environments.
Working with the Forth DSFB, we have been meeting with Scottish Government to discuss the Conservation Limits Consultation paper (link - http://www.gov.scot/Topics/marine/Salmon-Trout-Coarse/fishreform/licence/status), we are aware that there are some problems with the categorisations as they stand on some rivers and we are working with Marine Scotland to attempt to resolve these. The deadline for the consultation is 29 th September 2016.
Finally, I would like to welcome Kate Comins to the Trust. Kate will be heading up the delivery of the RiverLife: Almond & Avon project as the Project Coordinator and we look forward to working with her towards the successful delivery of the project.
Catchment Manager - Alison Baker
Senior Biologist - Jo Girvan
Biologist - Sylvian Barry
Project Developement Officer - Jonathan Louis
Project Officer (Allan Water Improvement Project) - Lawrence Belleni
Project Officer (Trossachs Water Vole Project) - Ryan Greenwood
Project Officer (Forth Invasive Non Native Species Programme) - Amy Fergusson
Ecology/Morphology - TrexEcology (Tommy McDermott)
Financial/Office Manager - Currently vacant
RiverLife: Almond & Avon
Programme Coordinator - Kate Comins
Capital Projects Manager - Currently vacant
Community Engagement Officer - Currently vacant
Volunteer Coordinator - Currently vacant
Project assistant - Currently vacant
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RiverLife: Almond & Avon
Kate Comins
River Forth Fisheries Trust were congratulated by MSP Roseanna Cunningham for its vision, drive and enthusiasm in developing the RiverLife: Almond & Avon Project. This is an exciting and ambitious £6.7 million catchment restoration project that aims to reconnect communities and wildlife to their local river. As the Project moves into the delivery phase, Kate Comins has now been appointed as the Project Co-ordinator and is busy recruiting three new members of staff;
- a Capital Projects Manager,
- a Community Engagement Officer and
- a Volunteer Co-ordinator.
For more details and to view the job descriptions for each of the posts please go to the River Forth Fisheries Trust website www.fishforth.co.uk/rfft/riverlifejobs. The deadline for applications is 27th September and it is hoped staff will be in post by the end of November.
Once in place, the Project Team will spend the winter ensuring everything is in place for the capital works projects at Bathgate and the Almond Barriers to begin in the spring. Work will also start on developing the training and education programmes and RiverLife staff will meet with communities and stakeholders to start developing the community engagement and interpretation aspects of the project. You can get in touch via riverlife@fishforth.co.uk and keep up to date via River Forth Fisheries Trust website.
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Conservation Limits 2017
Jo Girvan
The Scottish Government has released for consultation their 2017 Conservation Status categorizations for Scottish salmon rivers. SG, Marine Scotland and Trust biologists have been meeting regularly to determine the best way that conservation limits can be set. This is still a work in progress, but one major improvement since the 2016 categorizations came out is that salmon waters will now be assessed on an individual river by river basis rather than each District being assessed as a whole. This development is particularly welcome for the Forth District as we have ten major river systems with salmon stock levels and challenges that are all very different from each other.
There are three conservation categories that rivers can fall into. These are as follows:
Category 1 – Exploitation is sustainable and no change to current management practise is required and recognises the effectiveness of exsisting non-statutory conservation codes & practices.
Category 2 - Management action is necessary to reduce exploitation; mandatory catch and release will not be required in the first instance, but this will be reviewed annually.
Category 3 - Exploitation is unsustainable and mandatory catch and release (all methods) for 1 year will be required.
The categorisation that is placed on each river will be reviewed each year to ensure that changes in stock levels or unsuitable classifications are identified and dealt with accordingly. The Trust has already met with SG following some errors and anomalies that we spotted in the new classification, and a constructive discussion was had. The classification is now going to be checked and reviewed where appropriate. One particular point of note for the Forth is the way in which Special Areas of Conservation (SACs) are going to be dealt with. We are lucky to have the River Teith SAC in our District, and want to ensure that it is managed appropriately and sustainably for the long term.
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Fankerton Fish Counter
Jo Girvan
We are delighted to announce that our new fish counter at the fish pass at Fankerton is now up and running. The technical difficulties we have had since the counter was installed earlier this year have been solved and we are starting to receive data on any movements through the fish pass. This information will shortly become available to view through our website and we will be providing regular updates throughout the upstream spawning migration this Autumn.
The fish pass at Fankerton has been in place for one season, which means that adult salmon could potentially have spawned upstream of the weir last winter. We carried out electrofishing at three sites upstream of the weir in August this year to see if we could find any evidence of salmon spawning, but we did not find any salmon fry. It may take some time for enough adult salmon to ascend the fish pass and produce sufficient young so that we can pick them up through electrofishing survey.
Because the area has been inaccessible for many years, there has been no salmon spawning here and it may take time for adult salmon to ascend the pass in any numbers and build a genetic homing instinct to repopulate this part of the river. The counter will help us to monitor this.
Fish counters are one of the primary mechanisms for fisheries management, providing accurate figures on the number of adults returning to a river. This type of information can help with many aspects of management such as assessing the passability of existing fish passes and accurate conservation limit setting. We hope this will be the first of many fish counters that we will be able to install on the rivers of the Forth District. Two more counters are already in the pipeline through the RiverLife: Almond & Avon Project, with plans for others to follow.
Thanks to Andy from ACE Ltd UK and Gareth from Vaki for helping resolve the technical issues.
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Loch Ore Project
Sylvian Barry
LochOre is part of the River Leven catchment in Fife. The River Ore including the Loch is a substantial tributary running to the south of the main river. The river and loch have been substantially impacted by the land use within the catchment most significantly mining operations. These have left a legacy which includes past morphological changes to the location, size and shape of the loch. The loch is currently part of the LochOre Meadows complex and provides both an amenity and biodiversity hub.
From a fisheries perspective, LochOre has been run as a stocked fishery for some years by Fife Council (and latterly Fife Coast and Countryside Trust). There is a core contingent of local anglers as well as some visiting clubs. The loch is also used for the development of angling for local school groups and is part of a wider Sports Scotland Initiative. The use of the loch as a fishery is therefore a key component of its use.
In the past year however the economics of stocking and managing the fishery in line with past levels has being found to be uneconomic and new ways to manage the fishery whilst retaining its operations are required.
The objective of this project is to assess the potential of LochOre and the adjacent catchment to advise the steering group on the sustainability in terms of wild stock management and the future development of angling opportunities in a wild fishery.
The project started in July with a walkover survey of the main incoming tributaries. Approximately 6 km of streams were surveyed including the Kelty, Kinnaird, Lochornie and Pieries Burn. A habitat assessment was also carried out highlighting spawning areas, adult holding pools and any disturbance such as sewage input, lifestock poaching, conifer plantations or obstacle to fish passage. Following on from the walkover surveys, six fully quantitative electrofishing surveys were carried out to assess the health of fish populations in the tributaries. The results are still to be analysed but it is possible to highlight the main issues in the upper catchment, these are:
- The Kelty burn M90 culvert is impassable for brown trout and restricts the access to 2.5 km of the Kelty, Lochornie and Pieries Burns
- mine water input in Blairadam Wood
- siltation due to conifer plantation, livestock poaching and/or lack of riparian vegetation.
However, the electrofishing surveys have shown that the lower Kelty and the Kinnaird still have a good juvenile population of brown trout and densities recorded were considered as high or very high (respectively 64 and 116 fry/100m2).
Using a bathymetric map of the loch (see Jonathan's article below) It showed us how deep the loch is and if the loch is deep enough to allow a thermocline to develop during the summer months. The map was also used to determine where to carry out the fish population surveys. Trust staff and volunteers carried out a fishery survey of the loch, surveying in August but unfortunately no brown trout were caught although anglers are known to catch them. The fishery population is currently dominated by perch in term of density and biomass. A number of roach were seen from the jetty but not caught.
The LochOre project is not finished yet as Trust staff still need to complete a walkover on the river Ore downstream of the loch along with a water chemistry survey and a littoral habitat map. Once this has been collected, the Trust will produce a management plan with proposals including development of sustainable fish populations, future angling development and wider community engagement.
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Loch Ore Project - Bathymetric Mapping
Jonathan Louis
In the summer of 2016, the Trust decided to develop a new area of surveying, one which it has never taken part in before. Bathymetric mapping is a unique way to understand the depth and gradient of a water body and this information can be used for a range of different activities, especially fisheries management. Recently, the Trust was asked to carry out a study into LochOre in Fife to determine what type of fishery it is and whether it can be changed from "a put and take fishery" into a sustainable wild fishery. As part of this study, a bathymetric survey was needed so that the Trust's biologists knew the depths of the loch and where to survey. They needed to know this so that when netting took place, nets were evenly placed in three depth zones, 0 – 2.9m, 3m – 5.9m and 6m – 9.9m which is adhering to the CEN gill netting guidelines. The biologists were also keen to find out if there were any deep water refuges for native brown trout.
To undertake this work new equipment was necessary and this included a GPS receiver, a depth sounder and a data logger, so that geo-located depth points could be collected. As the loch is a fair size, it was important that we could efficiently collect multiple records at ease. The data logger records the GPS signal and depth from the depth sounder at intervals, storing it in its memory.
All this equipment needed to be connected to a power supply and our existing electrofishing batteries were put into secondary use. After a few days of head scratching and numerous trips to Halfords, Jonathan became the Trust's resident electrician and managed to wire everything up in such a way that it worked. After a quick test in the office fish tank, we collected our first records.
As soon as we had everything charged and ready to go we set off out onto the Loch. A special Thanks to Gordon from Fife Coast and Countryside Trust who manages the fishery as he readied a boat and we set of at snail’s pace with the depth sounder hanging over the side of the boat and the GPS unit pointing to the sky. Luckily we had two blue sky days out on the boat collecting the over 20,000 records to create the depth map. Once the records had been collected, Jonathan fed the information into our mapping software to churn out a very revealing depth map of Lochore. We found that the loch at its deepest reaches 27ft deep but some suprising data also emerged from the different gradients of the loch. You can clearly see on the map that the gradient abruptly changes and comparing the depth map to historic maps it is clear that the loch is man-made, previously being drained so that mining could take place.
The Trust has found this project extremely useful and is now set up to monitor other lochs within the District for fishery management tasks.
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Forth Invasive Non-Native Species Programme
Amy Fergusson
During Summer, Himalayan balsam control works were undertaken at Hopetoun Estate along one of our coastal burns and also at Loch Venachar on the Teith Catchment. This was a new infestation of Himalayan balsam right on the shore of Loch Venachar which, thanks to the rapid response of our partners and volunteer network within the National Park, was able to be dealt with swiftly and was removed from this area.
Treatment along various rivers for Japanese Knotweed has been ongoing for several weeks. The river catchments we have concentrated on are the Water of Leith, River Almond, River Avon, River Carron and Rivers Forth and Teith. Thanks to our volunteers and contractors, we have managed to treat the majority of these catchments thus far with treatment still ongoing. The extent of the Japanese Knotweed on these rivers has been declining year on year due to the control works that have been undertaken by the FINNS programme.
The Trust's Invasive Species Officer was also asked to speak at the Inner Forth Landscape Initiative ‘Defeating the Invaders’ conference in September. This conference brought speakers together to ensure best practice was shared and to allow delegates to hear successful projects and initiatives that have been undertaken around Scotland. This was incredibly successful and the Trust was grateful to be asked to share the experiences from the project with the other speakers and delegates on the day.
Finally, we would once again like to thank the volunteers who have managed to contribute some time to the treatment of the Invasive Species in our District this year. There is still time to get involved. For information on volunteer opportunities within the FINNS programme you can contact Amy at a.fergusson@fishforth.co.uk.
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River of Flowers
Jonathan Louis
Our River of Flowers project has well and truly been a success with a fantastic bloom over the summer. As we head into autumn, we will need to dismantle the flower bed and prepare it for winter so that it is ready to be planted again next spring.
The Trust and the River Avon Federation are currently looking for volunteers to help remove the plants and turn over the bed so that it is ready for winter.We will be holding a volunteer event on the 1st October between 10am and 2pm at the flower bed in Linlithgow.
If you would be interested helping us, please email Jonathan – j.louis@fishforth.co.uk to let us know that you plan to come along on the day.
If you have access to a trowel and gardening fork, please bring one on the day as tools may be limited.
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Flood Embankment Removal and Flood Risk
Lawrence Belleni
It has become increasingly popular for flood risk managers and river restoration specialists in Scotland to look at flood embankment removal to improve floodplain storage and to allow rivers to reconnect with their floodplains. Government bodies have been fundamental in highlighting the merits of carrying out such work and bringing embankment removal into the limelight. As a result, Flood Embankment Breaching, Lowering or Removal became a new option available to land occupiers in the Scottish Rural Development Programme’s 2014-2020 cycle, and it may be work that the RFFT looks at trying to achieve in the future. The benefits are clear for river processes, such as the ability to deposit fine sediments, nutrient exchange, and dissipate energy onto the floodplain resulting in less aggressive bankfull flow velocities. However, in contrast, the benefits of removing or breaching flood embankments for flood risk attenuation is less clear.
Flood embankments are built to protect land from flooding, so that it can be utilised for a specific purpose, in the Allan Water catchment like many others, the purpose is normally to defend agricultural land. In addition to defending land from flooding, flood embankments increase water conveyance through an area increasing the speed of delivery of water downstream, however they also serve as constriction in the river during high water flows. The constriction caused by the embankments may result in water being backed up and increasing upstream floodplain storage or flood risk depending on the presence of upstream properties. The increased floodplain storage upstream of embankments due to constriction can also provide attenuation to downstream flood risk. During large flood events flood embankments will be overtopped and the river will gain access to the floodplain on the rising limb of the flood hydrograph before the flood peak. This provides valuable floodplain storage during a period before the most damaging part of a flood occurs (its peak discharge) and therefore the embankments contribute to attenuating the most damaging part of a large flood. In addition, flood embankments can increase floodplain storage by the same method they were designed to keep water off the land. You could think of it as a double edged sword effect, once the embankments are overtopped they then act as bunds to stop floodplain flood waters from accessing the river again. This creates increased floodplain storage and allows the floodplain to hold the flood water during the receding limb of the flood, which lets the river recede quicker. This also raises the question about removing flood embankments from floodplains without introducing something of similar rigosity, such as hedges and wet woodland that could provide a similar floodplain storage. In the event of flood embankment removal on a floodplain without any works to replace lost rigosity, there may be a risk of increased floodplain water conveyance, which cold increase downstream flood risk also.
The flood embankments on the Allan Water in certain areas were noted as providing a positive contribution to flood risk attenuation during the biggest flood recorded in recent years, which was the 2006, 1 in 50 year flood return period event. During the 2006 flood, the Allan Water flood embankments helped attenuate downstream flood risk by increasing floodplain storage during the rising limb before the flood peak was reached, and holding flood water behind the embankments during the receding limb of the flood, which allowed the river to recede quicker.
What does all this mean for pursuing reconnected and functioning floodplains? In flood risk management terms, removing flood embankments does not necessarily attenuate flood risk as previously stated and may even increase flood risk in some circumstances. Therefore, when designing flood embankment removal projects it is important to speak to the local authority about the work you intend to do and whether they can inform on its impact to flood risk. Gaining an understanding of Potentially Vulnerable Areas (PVAs) to flood risk in the catchment and what flood return period the local authority is trying to defend these areas from is a useful starting point in this process. It may well be that frequent small floods at a 1 in 12 year flood return period are what cause the most frequent damage, and therefore access to floodplain storage at a lower river depth and removal of embankments for these events are what is important. Alternatively, increased floodplain storage and access to the floodplain on the rising limb of a larger flood, such as a 1 in 50 year flood return period event, may be the type of events the PVA needs defended from, and therefore a more targeted look at what embankments could be worked on will be required. Whichever the scenario, the flood embankment removal and flood risk question is an intricate one that should be taken cautiously and accompanied with hydrological modelling to understand how flood embankments interact with the river during different flood return period events and to help identify areas and embankments that can provide positive benefits to attenuating flood risk to PVAs.
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