Monday morning – a poem about cows pooing in rivers

I originally wrote this poem a couple of years ago for my PhD. It’s only loosely connected to river management, but I’m reblogging it because I think it might bring a few smiles on a dreary Monday morning.

The Geography and Environment postgraduate blog

So it’s good to have a healthy laugh at yourself once in a while, right? Nice to be able to just let go and be creative. A PhD can be pretty soul destroying without the right mind-set. I’ve always found writing poetry a good tonic for my cognitive ailments, and below you’ll find the grand total of my efforts one Tuesday afternoon sometime in 2010 – a poem about my PhD. How will they remember the poet laureate Dr. Trevor Bond, if not with this seminal piece? Enjoy.

Brown cow

The cow is brown, no doubt about it
The cow is brown, no need to shout it
Keep your voice down, if you want to see
Where it is that brown cow will wee
Terrestrial? Riparian? Or on the floodplain?
The geomorphic impact is hard to explain
As nutrient impacts from urine and faeces
Could affect all kinds of species

View original post 188 more words

The EU RESTORE Rivers Wiki

What is it?

The European River Restoration Wiki contains case studies of river restoration from across Europe. The Wiki currently has a Water Framework Directive focus and includes examples of mitigation, enhancement, rehabilitation, compensation and full-blown river restoration. It is hoped the Wiki will eventually become the principal repository for river restoration case studies, providing transparency for stakeholders, guidance for river managers and a public record of projects that attempt to improve Europe’s rivers.

How does it work?

The Wiki operates like any other Wiki – its content is uploaded, edited and moderated by its users. Anyone can upload a case study to the site once they have registered and that information can then be amended by any other registered user.

How do I upload information?

There are four easy steps (the website Help page provides more information):

1. Register via this ‘Create an account’ link

2. Once you have created an account and are logged in, use the ‘create a case study’ link

3. Next you have to input some information about your case study. The minimum you’ll need is a project title, a contact name, the country the project is in, the status of the project (i.e. planned/in progress/complete) and a map location.

4. You can add as much or as little additional information as you want. There’s a lot of detail you could potentially add, but a lot of it is superfluous. I would however recommend that you fill in the project overview and project summary information, which is a bit of a free-form and gives any reader the main headlines.

How do I find projects I’m interested in?

The Wiki has several tools for searching. Perhaps the most intuitive, and at the top of the main Wiki page, is the interactive map, which uses Google Maps to display the geographical location of case studies that have been uploaded. Below this is a list of countries and clicking on one will change the perspective of the map to focus on all the case studies occurring in that country. Clicking on any of the red balloons on either map will bring up the title of the case study (scrolling over reveals the title) and a link to that case study’s main page.

It is also possible to search case studies using the basic and advanced search tools. The array of potential search terms is extensive: cost, area, length of river restored, the reason for restoration, the contact organisation, the monitoring regime in place – the list goes on.

Who runs it?

A number of organisations, including the Environment Agency, are involved in the RESTORE partnership, who are responsible for the website’s inception and creation. Many of the schemes from England that are currently on the website have been uploaded using a database of case studies from the River Restoration Center. A full-list of contributors to the website can be found on the European River Restore Network Map.

This looks great but I think there are some things that could be improved; who do I contact?

A list of contacts for the RESTORE Wiki can be found on the website. Alternatively, and if your suggestions are incredibly succinct, there is a RESTORE Rivers Twitter feed. I’d also be able to pass on any comments you make at the end of this post.

So, get uploading! I know that lots of you know about projects that aren’t currently on here and as with everything that has an interactive, social media element, the more the community puts in the more the community will get out.

Happy restoring!

What to do with lost urban rivers beneath our feet

In my first post, I showed how urban rivers have become hidden and eventually lost. Have you done your homework? A little test to begin with then:

Lost urban rivers might be physically buried in culverts beneath our feet, but they might instead be simply obscured from everyday view, and therefore forgotten about. There is a trend towards rediscovering and uncovering lost urban rivers. The process of removing the culverts is called “de-culverting”, or more commonly “daylighting”.

This post discusses the types, the benefits, and the costs of daylighting our lost urban rivers. Some examples will follow in a future post.

Types

Daylighting is often considered to be the most “radical expression” of river restoration; removing the lid and exposing a watercourse to sunlight once more is a dramatic change to a river. In reality, daylighting rarely just involves removing the lid of the river, it will also usually necessitate some additional work to restore and improve the channel. We can consider perhaps three degrees of physical daylighting, as shown in the diagram below.

Design typologies for deculverting, showing the generalised degrees of culvert removal and associated river restoration when daylighting. Diagram by author, copyright © 2013, Catchment Science Centre, University of Sheffield.

There is also an important distinction to make in terms of the style of daylighting. It is easiest to consider this on a spectrum from “architectural” (typically artificial, designed, hard engineered, components included for human enjoyment) to “naturalistic” (typically a more natural channel shape, geomorphic processes, less managed). This is illustrated below:

Daylighting style guide on a spectrum from “architectural” to “naturalistic”, with example images shown to illustrate this. All photos by author, except bottom centre by Environment Agency NW, and bottom right by ERZ Zurich.

An additional form is non-physical, socio-cultural daylighting. Providing education, awareness, information boards and so on can reconnect people to a river buried beneath them, even if it cannot be physically uncovered. I think this is a really interesting and positive approach, and there are a few examples. Various groups celebrate hidden rivers through art, poetry, education and outreach, public walks, historical studies, and urban exploration. The River Moselle is made visible briefly through a glass floor in the public library – children especially are excited to learn more about this hidden river. Another project traced a lost watercourse, installing speakers along the route playing audio of the water flow – “sonic daylighting“.

We need more examples of where non-physical,  socio-cultural daylighting has been attempted, to evaluate whether it can still deliver useful benefits.

Benefits

Daylighting is claimed to bring various environmental, social and economic benefits. It is currently difficult to assess these as shown in recent research, but CIWEM summarises the range of benefits in its Policy Position Statement:

• Providing valuable wetland/aquatic habitat, aiding fish passage and significantly adding to the visual attraction of an area.
• Offering educational and play opportunities for children, enhancing pedestrian and cycle routes and giving people a touch of the countryside and its seasons in the town.
• Restoring historic canals for amenity or for navigation by powered and unpowered boats.
• Using water in motion to mask city noise and provide an atmosphere of quiet and calm.
• Complementing other urban regeneration initiatives and bringing commercial benefits such as enhanced image for properties and up to 20% increase in land values or rents.
• Reducing maintenance and construction costs by using natural bioengineering techniques rather than concrete constructions.
• Reducing flood risk and creating balancing ponds to help reduce flooding downstream.
• Giving a place a sense of identity, because each combination of landform, waterway, bank side buildings and bridges is unique.

The list above is not exhaustive – it doesn’t for example capture the benefits of deculverting directly on water quality, by enabling better nitrate processing in the water column. Nor does it capture the benefits arising from making pollution and misconnections more visible, promoting better public stewardship of urban rivers, or mitigating the urban heat island effect.

Costs

Physical daylighting can be expensive. We currently don’t have a good way of estimating the costs, as there are so many site-specific interventions, such as contaminated land being revealed along the river banks, structural works to buildings, roads and buried sewers, and the style of deculverting required. Reported costs have varied between £45 – £10,000 per metre. We need further case studies to help to improve these cost estimates.

What is clear, however, is that culvert removal is increasingly considered as a viable alternative to costly repairs of existing, ageing, and structurally poor culverts. This is both important for initial capital construction costs, but also the ongoing culvert maintenance (dangerous and costly) and risk of blockage and flooding. This financial argument is often a key driver for initiating a deculverting project, more important than the potential environmental or social benefits themselves.

The River Darwen was daylighted with multiple drivers in mind: flood risk management, Water Framework Directive, protected species habitat improvement, fish passage, reducing culvert maintenance / repair costs, and providing public access to the watercourse. Photo by the Environment Agency NW.

Conclusion

What can we learn from this? Four things:

1. We can do something about the lost urban rivers beneath our feet.
2. Daylighting is both physical removal of the culvert, as well as the social reconnection to hidden watercourses – and although it is becoming more widely known, many people, practitioners, planners and policy makers should be aware of this.
3. There are plenty of examples of daylighting projects, with numerous drivers and claimed benefits.
4. Most daylighting projects have not attempted to quantify or assess whether the benefits they anticipated are achieved. If this post-work appraisal was conducted, it is rarely publicly available.

To address this challenge, there is a map-based website where practitioners and researchers working on deculverting projects are encouraged to enter case study information, as well as browse past case studies for inspiration or information. With enough examples, it will be possible to assess the many claimed environmental, social and economic benefits of daylighting. More on that next time.

@losturbanrivers — Facebook.com/DaylightingUrbanRivers — www.daylighting.org.uk

Lost urban rivers beneath our feet

Sheffield is a water city. It owes its name to the River Sheaf (“a clearing by the river“), one of five notable streams through the city. It owes its historical wealth to the water mills powering cutlery and steel industries from the fast and steep flow. Its historical layout was defined by the topography – the contours of the hills and valleys carved out by water. Water is celebrated subtly today to any visitor arriving at Sheffield’s railway station. The fountains and water features adorning the “golden route” walkway up to the city centre remind us of this watery heritage.

Water features at Sheffield Station – the city celebrates its watery heritage in recently regenerated areas. Image by author.

And yet, just like many towns and cities around the world, it has largely turned its back on the streams that flowed through it. This is a story of the “urban stream syndrome“. I will tell this story as a journey along Sheffield’s Porter Brook, a tributary of the River Sheaf. The general story is applicable to almost any urban watercourse, in whichever town or city you live.

The Porter Brook rises on the eastern edge of the Peak District, collecting rainwater drained through the moors, and out from clear springs. Some of these springs were sacred to past pagan societies, and provide cool clear baseflow to the brook, even throughout dry summers. The Porter Brook winds through farmland, picking up flow from more springs. Rainwater runs off over fields to join the brook, collecting with it sediment and nutrients. In some places, the brook is crossed by small roads, and is piped beneath them. In other places, the watercourse has been straightened along the edge of fields, but for the most part, and like most watercourses, it has formed historical field boundaries for hundreds of years.

God’s Spring rising on the edge of the Peak District, overlooking Sheffield. The Porter Brook sources from similar nearby springs. Image by author.

As the Porter reaches the outskirts of the city, historical modifications for the water mills become apparent. From its 10 km journey from source to where it joins the River Sheaf in the city centre, there were 21 mill ponds serving around 19 water wheels during its peak in the 19th century. Remnants of these old heritage features still exist, with some of the flow being held back into lakes that look as though they’ve always been there.

Porter Brook at Sharrow Mills, the flow held back in a tranquil mill pond. Image by Warofdreams, Wikimedia Commons.

Between the few remaining millponds, the brook becomes increasingly confined and restricted as urban development spilled into the valley and close to the edges of the banks. Major residential areas nestle within the Porter Valley – sometimes the brook is given space and prominence in open parks, occasionally joined by other small rivulets. But more frequently as we continue downstream, the water is piped below roads, and hidden behind and beneath buildings.

Urban development creeping up the edges of the Porter Brook, and frequent bridges. Image by Lodestar, 28DaysLater.

Buildings turned their back on the Porter Brook, when historically it had become a polluted eyesore (open sewer), and built right to the edge of the channel to maximise development space. Image by Lodestar, 28DaysLater.

Porter Brook entering the darkness of a culvert, flowing beneath buildings, car parks and roads. Image by Lodestar, 28DaysLater.

Culverts encase a watercourse below ground. They are typically made of stone or concrete. Sometimes they are fully circular pipes, sometimes they are a lid over the stream with straightened, engineered banks. Along the 10 km of the Porter Brook, not including bridges(*), there are about 1 km of culverts. Yes. 10% of the river is buried below our feet. Some of the culverts are over 300 metres long. For an urban river, that is quite common.

(*Bridges are effectively the same as a culvert, but a culvert is defined typically as being three times longer than it is wide).

The Porter Brook flows through the Cultural and Industrial Quarter in Sheffield, near the end of it’s journey. This area was once hub of water mill activity. We get a peak of the Porter Brook before it flows underneath a car park at Matilda Street. Here it is severely degraded, with heavily modified concrete channels and banks. To the citizens of Sheffield, the Porter Brook is a hidden, forgotten stream, hard to recognise from its natural beginnings in the countryside (just a few kilometers upstream), seemingly devoid of life and interest, a place that attracts rubbish and pollution. It is only noticed when it floods occasionally, or by poetic graffiti artists.

he last open section of the Porter Brook before it joins the River Sheaf in a culvert beneath Sheffield Station. It is degraded, concrete lined, and treated like a drain and rubbish tip. This is less than 100 metres from the fountains shown in the first picture. Image by author.

Most people have no idea that the stream is culverted beneath them in many places. How many people have stood on Platform 5 at the station, not realising that Sheffield’s Porter Brook joins with the flow of the River Sheaf in the darkness below, the station elevated above the water on stone Victorian pillars? To many people, the Sheaf Valley at this point is all but invisible beneath the concrete of the city. The Sheaf and the Porter flow in culverts all the way to the River Don, where at last they reach the open air again. Not before they pass through the “Megatron” – a culvert so large and impressive, it has featured on a list of most impressive caves.

The Megatron. The Porter Brook joins the River Sheaf in darkness beneath Sheffield railway station, and they flow hidden in this huge Victorian storm drain. Image by dsankt, SleepyCity.

Sheffield is a water city. The city sleeps, but the springs and streams still flow beneath us. This is the same story in many towns and cities around the world. London, Toronto, New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, Paris, Zurich and more are all beginning to rekindle an interest in lost urban rivers. Lost urban rivers might be physically hidden in culverts beneath our feet, or they might be just psychologically hidden from view and forgotten about.

So now you know. Keep a look out for a lost urban river near you.

@losturbanrivers — Facebook.com/DaylightingUrbanRivers — www.daylighting.org.uk

The only way (for nature) is Essex

What do you think of when you think of Essex? Perma-tans? The late lead singer of the Blockheads, Ian Dury? The Dagenham Girl Pipe Band, so eloquently described by the great (and also sadly late) Douglas Adams in the fascinating river management-related book (not really), The Salmon of Doubt?

Whatever you think, it probably doesn’t have much to do with nature, and that’s a shame. Essex is one of the most interesting and most challenging counties in the country for river management. It is gifted with a number of hidden gems but also known for a number of contentious issues. In this post I want to extrapolate on the former, and explain why Essex is so intruiging for nature lovers and river managers alike.

So Essex. Where is Essex? Essex is here.

The county of Essex (Copyright Ordnance Survey 2012)

Situated to the north-east of London, Essex is one of the most populous counties in England. The county also boasts over 300 miles of coastline and a large, if often understated, agricultural sector. Ancient woodlands, an array of designated sites, and a number of inconspicuous rivers make parts of Essex great places to live – the Great Eastern Mainline is one of the busiest rail routes in England; London commuter’s love it.

There are a couple of rivers I’d like to talk about in this blog post; the River Crouch, which runs from Little Burstead to the North Sea, and the less known River Ter, a tributary of the River Chelmer.

Gravel bar on the River Crouch

Firstly the River Crouch. I found this beauty of a gravel bar forming at the confluence of the River Crouch downstream of Wickford and the Runwell Brook. This feature, generated as a product of the reduction in local streampower where the two watercourses meet, illustrates the potential for highly responsive lowland rivers to produce geomorphic landforms.

Multi-threaded channel on the River Crouch at Laindon Barnes

Upstream on the River Crouch I found this feature. More typical of the anastomosed planform you might expect of this river type, the river channel has been split in to two due to the deposition of cohesive sediment following a high flow event. Again the river is disconnected from its floodplain here and this has undoubtably contributed to the formation of this feature, but it’s still impressive. Even heavily modified systems may have the capacity for natural recovery.

A logjam on the River Ter

Interestingly, the River Ter is different from the areas of the River Crouch that I looked at, being as it is a bit further up the catchment. Here I found something more akin to the streams of the New Forest. Granted, the gradient may be shallower but the processes are much the same – a log-jam that causes bed scour and over-tops during bank-full flow, with ponded flow upstream. There’s alot of wood in the River Ter and it’s encouraging natural processes.

There are many other interesting rivers in Essex that I haven’t mentioned; the River Brain downstream of Witham, which you can visit on the train; the River Wid; and the lovely Roman River. Not to forget the numerous brown-field sites, which often have unique invertebrate assemblages.

And where the river’s aren’t that great – particularly in south-Essex – opportunity. Flood defence AND river restoration. A challenge!

If you want to keep up with all the latest rivery happenings in Essex, why not follow the Essex Rivers blog?

I love rivers because..

I saw the following tweet on Valentine’s day

Fill in the blank: I love rivers because ________________________! fb.me/2tk93VAMD

— Adam Broadhead (@losturbanrivers) February 15, 2013

I thought about this for a while and decided that 140 characters would be no way to do justice to my obsession, so this is an attempt to explain how I came to be a researcher into rivers and how it took me a long time to realise that rivers were something I was in love with.

Where it all started

River Leam at Offchurch Bury
© Copyright Robin Stott and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

As a child I was really keen on wildlife and I grew up in a large town, but only a couple of miles from a rural stretch of the River Leam in Warwickshire; a lazy lowland meandering river that winds its way through pasture and arable land, probably many people’s idea of a classic English river. So even from fairly young I had an appreciation for the way a river moves through and dominates a landscape, the way the land slopes down into a broad river valley from miles away, and the variety of iconic wildlife such as Kingfishers that I didn’t see anywhere else.

Rivers at school

I’d like to pretend it was this romantic vision that led me on my current path, and while it played an important part, the key thing for me is maths. I’m a massive nerd and I still remember a GCSE lesson where we were told (in a throw away fashion) about the (famous) mathematical relationships between river parameters – that the channel width is proportional to the meander wavelength, pool-riffle spacing etc. The idea that such variety and such chaos could have underlying mathematical relationships stuck in my impressionable young mind and never left it. I did all my GCSE and A-level geography projects on rivers; firstly a (in hindsight very ambitious) riparian vegetation assessment for my GCSE and some work on flooding for my A-levels.

The wilderness years

River Leam nr Offchurch
© Copyright David P Howard and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

I then didn’t work or study rivers for about 11 years. I didn’t realise it at the time, but in hindsight that interest in landscapes and rivers never left me. I took up canoeing on lowland rivers which took my back to my first ever childhood experiences of messing around by the Leam and in 2^nd hand bookshops I’d browse the science sections looking for texts on rivers and geomorphology (among many other diverse and odd interests, such as ancient history I should point out, river are only obvious in hindsight!) I’d flick through these old geomorphology books from the 1950’s & 60’s trying to decipher them like Egyptian hieroglyphs.

I’ve now been working with rivers for nearly 5 years, and it feels both as if it is what I am meant to do, but in a strange way it’s hard to remember when I did anything else; I think on some level even while working for a bank it was just a matter of discovering that I always was someone who works with rivers, rather than becoming that person.

Implications for the classroom

Bluebell Wood nr Offchurch Bury – one of my GCSE coursework fieldsites for vegetation study.
© Copyright paul freeman and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

One of the important things to take from this I suppose is that although I was fortunate to be able to escape the large town I grew up in for days in the country by a river, the thing that really cemented an interest in studying rivers was that GCSE lesson. It wasn’t a full on earth science syllabus, just a couple of hours on river geomorphology and that was enough to stay with me. I’m not sure if children need loads of complex and varied earth science in the classroom, but even a small bit can spark an interest that lasts a lifetime. Closer to domestic politics, it was the assessed coursework I did for my GCSE and A-level that started me on understanding rivers and the scientific method. The current UK government want to shift to a learning by rote no coursework system for schools, robbing children of the chance to expand their knowledge beyond reciting facts. Yes coursework can be a cop out for some, but the benefits it instils can last a lifetime.

I love rivers because…

To go back to where I started I think my answer will be a little strange, rivers obviously intrigue me and I like nothing more than trying to unpick their secrets, but they also terrify me. I am a poor swimmer and deep in my subconscious I suspect I am going to end by drowning in a river. So I’d have to say

“I love rivers because they fascinate and frighten me in equal measure”.

Happy belated Valentine’s Day.

Why not spend Valentine’s Day by a river?

Well the obvious answer is that it’s too cold and too wet. I don’t know about you but I’m getting pretty tired of winter 2012/2013. In Ipswich we had settling snow yesterday and localised surface water flooding today.

Rivers are a great place to spend with your loved one. If we think about all of the great cinematic love stories they pretty much all nearly happened by a river; the final scene of Brief Encounter (originally planned to occur at a ferry port, not a railway station), Jack and Rose in Titanic (river/sea, it’s much the same) and the film Casablanca (the Oum Er-Rbia River famously runs around 40 miles away from the city).

OK, so perhaps rivers don’t feature THAT heavily in romantic films, but that doesn’t mean that rivers aren’t romantic. Indeed technical geomorphological terms that explain river form and functioning can be downright saucy. Lateral accretion, vertical incision and bed-rock (as in ‘I can make your bed rock’ – a classic back-of-the-university-hoodie phrase for geomorphologists/geologists) would all make their way into the script of Carry On Geomorphology. I certainly know that Simon’s research is a bit ooh-er missus, and full of innuendo with all of his key members and large wood.

Sexy time aside, rivers really are genuinely lovely places to be. The sound of the water is soothing and the riparian environment is often full of pretty insects and birds. You can carve you and your partners name in a tree with a suitable bridging message such as ‘4eva’, and then push the tree in the river to increase flow diversity. You could punt or row down the river as your companion looks on at the stunning fluvial processes happening all around them, or take a stroll down a barge tow path, hand-in-hand.

Although today is Valentine’s Day I will have to wait until tomorrow to share one of my local rivers with my girlfriend. My plan is to take the train to Manningtree and then walk up and down the lower River Stour. Apparently there are footpaths on either side of the river so you can walk downstream one way and then upstream the other, completing a loop. As well as being close to an RSBP site near the Stour estuary, the walk will incorporate one of the most fascinating structures I’ve ever seen – the Cattawade Sluice. I won’t go into great detail about this now as it’s not particularly romantic and I plan to blog about the sluice in the near future, but what I will say is that it needs to be seen to be believed…

So why not spend Valentine’s Day by a river? Have a picnic. Try not to let your lover or your dog cause too much bank erosion and take your litter with you when you leave. Think about how wonderful our rivers are and how much pleasure you get from being near them. They’re magical places, and you should share that magic with someone you love.

Politik

I’m sitting here with this idea for a blog post and it is along these lines: I natter on about ‘what you should do’ to manage rivers but I never really talk very much about the politics of this, and how difficult it can be to actually get things done. I’m also watching BBC Democracy LIVE in the House of Commons and they’re debating the The Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill. Politics permeates everything we do, and although it would be flippant to compare the politics of gay marriage to the politics of watershed management, the vigour and passion with which people talk about their rivers should not be understated.

Any why not? The way rivers behave, the ecosystem services and natural resources they provide, and their aesthetic value are all important to someone, whether they realise it or otherwise. You might be a fisherman (97% of all people who fish are male – if you haven’t read the 2012 National Angling Survey then I’d recommend it), spending your weekends catching trout and salmon. You might be a water utility company looking for an abstraction licence, or an avid canoeist who enjoys the recreational amenity of our rivers. Perhaps you have no direct connection with rivers, but have been effected by rising water bills or flooding.

And with different interests and concerns come different opinions and therefore conflict. Restoring a knackered river to a more natural state might be great for biodiversity but throwing a load of wood in the channel isn’t going to help navigation for barges or small river craft. Equally, over-abstracting water from a river may increase a utility company’s profits but may have damaging effects upon stream ecology, fluvial geomorphology and overall river functioning.

It’s no wonder then that sometimes there’s bad blood. I’ve linked to this article in a previous post and I really think you should read it. To summarise, the article reports on a meeting between farmers and Paul Leinster (Environment Agency Chief Executive) to discuss, amongst other things, the impacts of recent flooding upon arable agriculture. The article is interesting in itself but the comments made by readers are even more so.

Whatever side of the fence you’re on, you need to get a saw and maybe a hammer with one of those nail remover thingies, because that fence needs to come down. In my experience the best way of dealing with conflicting concerns is to talk them over. Sit round the table, have plenty of tea and biscuits available (you’ll need them) and thrash the issue out. Be transparent and if you can manage it, be objective.If you’re lacking evidence then go get evidence. If you’re lacking technical expertise then go get technical expertise. It’s very business speaky but if you can, make your final decision using a risk-based approach. Nothing should be insurmountable.

On a related note a colleague of mine said to me today that I might want to consider my use of the word ‘stakeholder’. She said that they’re not stakeholders, as they don’t hold stakes. I said to her that sometimes they do. I said to her that sometimes when they see me coming they adopt a square formation, like a regiment of medieval pikemen ready to absorb a cavalry charge. Partners? Customers? People? River management can be tricky enough without getting bogged down in semantics, and yet our choice of words is all part of the Politik.

Rivers flood

To begin, a quote:

“Clean out the rivers, repair the river banks and keep the water where it belongs…IN THE RIVER.”

There is an age old saying among fluvial geomorphologists that I’ve just made up, and it is ‘never buy a house on the floodplain’. I live on a hill. Simon Dixon lives on a hill. My PhD supervisor David Sear lives on a hill. This may or may not be a coincidence.

The name prescribed to the floodplain is literal; it is the land adjacent to a river that is inundated with water when the flow in the river is elevated above its banks. This floodplain area will generally increase in size as you move further down the river course, and may be characterised by relic channels marking the former location of the river. In most rivers the floodplain acts as an important transitional zone for the exchange of nutrients and sediment between the aquatic and terrestrial environments. Indeed the entire water meadow system that characterises much of southern-England’s grazing pasture is based upon this exchange.

So floods are natural and normal. The average river will probably experience out-of-bank flows between one-three times each year. These relatively predictable floods are punctuated by extreme events, the magnitude of which is typically defined by their frequency (e.g. a one in 25 year event). It’s often the extreme events that receive the most attention and affect the most people, with the 1953 floods being a prime example. Extreme events also tend to  have the most impressive geomorphic consequences; although all floods play a role in the connection between aquatic, riparian and terrestrial environments.

Now all of this would be fine if we hadn’t spent centuries trying to stop our rivers flooding. An expanding population and a restriction on space have led to extensive developments on many floodplains, with flood defences creating complacency amongst homeowners. Where there is arable agriculture, a history of dredging and maintenance activites have made some farmers believe that rivers should not flood. The quote at the start of this post has been taken from the comments section at the bottom on this article in the Farmers Guardian. The rest of the comments also make for interesting reading.

Simon has recently discussed the public perception of rivers, and there is clearly scope and room to educate stakeholders. How do we do this? Engagement. Take children to their local river and teach them about the way it works. Show them its value and share with them your understanding of its importance. With the increasing influence of technology and whizzy electronic gizmo’s there’s every chance that the our kids will be more disconnected from the natural world than any previous generation. It’s very difficult to take care of something you don’t understand.

And if you’re not young and you’re not sure about how rivers work then have a look around our blog. River management is not easy but a good starting point is understanding how rivers naturally manage themselves, and the irrevocable truth is that rivers flood.

Perceptions of naturalness in rivers

Loosely connected to my ongoing series of posts about river restoration I thought I would review a few scientific papers that I think are some of the most illuminating on the relationship between humans and rivers.

The two key papers are written by Professor Anne Chin from University of Colorado in the US, she is a fluvial geomorphologist, but conducted experiments into people’s perceptions of wood in rivers, perhaps traditionally a more social science type investigation. If you want to look them up the two summary references are at the bottom of this post.

Perceptions of naturalness

In their literature review the authors report that although the scientific/academic community is largely positive with respect to the role wood can play in rivers and particularly in the use of wood in restoration, the public don’t fully understand or accept wood in rivers. They report on a 2009 study which showed the public thought forests with less downed wood were more aesthetically pleasing (1). A couple of previous studies (2, 3) and the two reviewed here showed a selection of photographs of rivers to members of the public and their responses showed a traditional and fairly negative attitude to wood in rivers.

Some of the photographs used in the study from the wiley-blackwell website. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/rra.2617/full

Most people, including natural science undergraduate students felt that rivers with little or no wood were more aesthetically pleasing (e.g. d & e above) and that those rivers with wood were more dangerous and more in need of improvement e.g. dredging and/or removal of wood (e.g. a & c above).

River managers’ perceptions

In the recent 2012 paper Chin and her colleagues conducted the experiment with river managers in the US and found they rated rivers with wood as more natural, more aesthetically pleasing, less dangerous and less in need of improvements than those without wood (following the general scientific opinion). Interestingly when compared to previous student surveys the views of these managers tended to run counter to the views of the students in the same geographical locations, i.e. they had the opposite views to the people on the sort of courses they themselves would have studied in order to become river managers. Perhaps most interestingly when they analysed these results they picked up on a trend that river managers became more favourable towards wood in rivers the longer they had been in the position.

In short the public at large has a fundamentally different viewpoint about what a natural river looks like than those people with expert knowledge. In order to decrease resistance to river management strategies involving wood (such as the campaign groups I mentioned in an earlier post) they argue the distance between the expert knowledge and the public needs to be reduce and they suggest that the public at large need to be exposed to more fluvial environments and to the expert knowledge of river managers in order to help reverse the deep rooted negative perceptions of wood in rivers.

The bulk of this perception work was done in the US, but I have no reason to suspect the overall results would be vastly different in the UK and EU and indeed some of the vociferous opposition to river restoration and wood in rivers I have come across suggests to me it would be the same.

What we can do

Although somewhat abstract I think the findings of these papers can provide some really important insight to river managers and scientists everywhere. Firstly we need to recognise the wider public perception of wood in rivers and river restoration in general, in order to anticipate where management strategies might fail to gain public support. Secondly the conclusions of these papers put the burden of “educating” the public in the hands of river managers and scientists so we all need to engage wherever we can to help spread the message that “wood is good”.

 

Studies reviewed:

Chin, A., Daniels, M., Urban, M., Piegay, H., Gregory, K., Bigler, W., Butt, A., Grable, J., Gregory, S., Lafrenz, M., 2008. Perceptions of wood in rivers and challenges for stream restoration in the United States. Environmental Management, 41(6), 893-903.

Chin, A., Laurencio, L., Daniels, M., Wohl, E., Urban, M., Boyer, K., Butt, A., Piegay, H., Gregory, K., 2012. The significance of perceptions and feedbacks for effectively managing wood in rivers. River Res. Appl., n/a-n/a.

Further references:

(1)    Ribe RG. 2009. In-stand scenic beauty of variable retention harvests and mature forests in the U.S. Pacific Northwest: the effects of basal area, density, retention pattern and down wood. Journal of Environmental Management 91: 245–260. DOI: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2009.08.014.

(2)    Piégay H, Gregory KJ, Bondarev V, Chin A, Dahlstrom N, Elosegi A, Gregory SV, Joshi V, Mutz M, Rinaldi M, Wyzga B, Zawiejska J. 2005. Public perception as a barrier to introducing wood in rivers for restoration purposes. Environmental Management 36: 665–674. DOI: 10.1007/s00267-004-0092-z.

(3)    Le Lay Y-F, Piégay H, Gregory K, Chin A, Dolédec S, Elosegi A, Mutz M, Bartlomiej W, Zawiejska J. 2008. Variations in cross-cultural perception of riverscapes in relation to in-channel wood. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 33: 268–287. DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2008.00297.x.