Focus: Free lecture series

On Friday evening I attented a lecture at Birkbeck University, part of a free lecture series for Spring 09 encompassing all freshwater habitat issues in the UK. This particular lecture was presented by Paul Raven, Head of conservation and Ecology at the Environment Agency in Bristol and entitled 'Getting on with the job: taking practical action for freshwater ecology and conservation'.

The lecture itself could have been extremely dull, but the speaker flew through the Agency info at the start to get to the 'interesting bits' as he calls it. Some of the facts were in fact quite interesting, what the Agency's budget is spent on, top environmental pressures (nitrates, invasive alien species, water asbtraction etc) drivers (EU Biodiversity Strategy 2010, Improving conditions of SSSI's, Climate change adaptation etc) and blueprints & plans for investors and the general public to see how their money is spent.

Client of Environment Agency

There were some interesting examples of work carried out by the Environment Agency, the science behind what they do is a mammoth task: a fair amount of it was bordering on gobbeldegook to me.......Some examples were:

Iron-oxides removed from minewaters in Gwenffrwd, Wales. Dissolved and recovered in early 1990's.

Sheep dipping in Wales: Agency workers had to walk the length of rivers to understand why levels of macro-invertibrates were so low.

Barton Broads-manipulation: Dredging sediment and the science behind it. http://www.ukcpi.org/educ/broadsauthority.html

Barton Broads Picture courtesy of http://www.ukcpi.org/

Flood defences - Calvert of the River Ravensbourne in Lewisham

River Ravensbourne courtesy of http://www.beckenhamplaceparkfriends.org.uk/

The Jubilee River in Maidenhead - flood relief channel creating a new recreational resource with approximately 1000 visitors per week. http://www.maidenhead.net/information/flood.html

The Great Fen - re-instating wetlands, Won £10m Lottery Fund, National Trust. http://www.greatfen.org.uk/index.php

Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (SUDS) http://www.ciria.org.uk/suds/

And non-native invasive species of plants.........

Japanese Knotweed Courtesy of http://www.lincolntown.org/

A lovely little story that did come up was about improving economic resilience, or maybe it was ecologic, but an example somewhere was putting up barn owl boxes, which found new owners very quickly - see below. The management regime of the area in question changed and so was managed better.

Barn owls courtesy of www.bioweb.uncc.edu