S&TA awards environmental fisheries project

Eden Rivers Trust recognised for innovative ecological survey work

The Salmon & Trout Association (S&TA) presented the first ever £4,000 pound Best fisheries project with environmental improvements award to the Eden Rivers Trust for their innovative RARE (Rapid Assessment of the River Environment) project at the Association of Rivers Trusts (ART) annual awards’ ceremony in Pembrokeshire. S&TA sponsored the award in conjunction with ART.

Alistair Maltby and Lucy Dugdale of the Eden Rivers Trust planned and delivered the RARE (Rapid Assessment of the River Environment) Project. They combined the innovative use of detailed aerial photography, satellite and radar data with extensive electro-fishing along the length of the river and modelling of water flow across land. This aerial and fish survey combination ‘ground truths’ the river’s ecological health. It also shows the effects of land management on the river’s ecological health.

The results from RARE will enable the Eden River Trust to target land management improvements in the specific areas that are having the greatest negative impact on the river’s health. These results will allow the Trust to make best use of its limited resources.

S&TA believes that the RARE project not only contributes enormously to a detailed and specific ecological understanding of the River Eden area, but also provides a successful blueprint for how all UK River catchments should be assessed to better target and prioritise land and water ecological improvement programmes.

S&TA director, Paul Knight explains, “S&TA is lobbying Defra and the EA that, for the relatively insignificant sum of £7-8m, every English and Welsh river catchment could be surveyed in a similar way to the Eden’s RARE Project. This would enable future Government and private funding to be targeted on a priority basis. It would provide the most efficient and effective way to join together programmes and measures required by the Water Framework Directive to improve land management for fisheries.”

Knight continues, “Alistair Maltby and Lucy Dugdale have undertaken tremendously innovative work for the Eden Rivers Trust that, if adopted by Government on a national scale, would see tremendous benefits for implementing environmental improvement programmes with positive results”.