Wychwood Wild Garden Aquatic Survey Final report to support the restoration of the ponds

Wychwood Wild Garden (WWG) is an area of woodland and historic garden which once formed part of Shipton Court, but is now managed and owned by the local community. Within the Wild Garden are two ponds, both artificial in creation, but dating back to the 19th century. In addition to the ponds, the water flows north through “The Lifts”, a series of three canals, each with a low cascade to the one below; the final one having a sluice at the northern boundary of the gardens where the water forms a headwater tributary of the River Evenlode

Llyn Anafon: Ecological assessment of the aquatic flora to support HRA, 2017

Llyn Anafon lies within the Eryri SAC, North Gwynedd, Wales (500 m amsl). Originally a natural lake, the level was raised by approximately 1.5 m in 1929 to provide potable water. Although now out of active commission for water supply, the site owners Dwr Cymru / Welsh Water (DCWW) maintain the responsibility for the dam and the site remains within the jurisdiction of the Reservoirs Act 1975. Deterioration of the retaining dam resulted in the most recent Section 10 report to conclude that the risk of failure exceeded acceptable levels and that a long-term solution is required in the interests of public safety. This report triggered DCWW to consider a series of engineering options ranging from full repair to complete removal of the dam, with decommissioning being the favoured plan for the long-term sustainability and safety of the site

Gaudet Luce Golf & Leisure Complex, Worcestershire: Report on aquatic habitats 2017

Gaudet Luce Golf & Leisure Complex is located in the county of Worcestershire (Figure 1), southeast of Droitwich Spa town. Founded in 1995, the golf course has undergone an extensive transformation which has included a new Par Three course, reconfiguration of the 18 hole Phoenix Course and the planting of over 50,000 trees across the golf complex, which were supplied to Gaudet Luce via a Forestry Commission grant. Drainage systems have also been improved over time, alongside the installation of new bunkers and tee renovation (Midlands Business News, 2013; Fernihough, 2017)

Critical loads of sulphur and nitrogen for surface waters in Northern Ireland

A survey of 140 surface waters (lakes, streams and reservoirs) across Northern Ireland was carried out in March 2000. One site was selected to represent each 10km OS NI grid square in Northern Ireland using a map of freshwater sensitivity to identify the most acid sensitive water body in each grid squar

Expanding the role of participatory mapping to assess ecosystem service provision in local coastal environments

There has been increasing international effort to better understand the diversity and quality of marine natural capital, ecosystem services and their associated societal benefits. However, there is an evidence gap as to how these benefits are identified at the local scale, where benefits are provided and to whom, trade-offs in development decisions, and understanding how benefits support well-being. Often the benefits of conservation are poorly understood at the local scale, are not effectively integrated into policy and are rarely included meaningfully in public discourse. This paper addresses this disjuncture and responds to the demand for improving dialogue with local communities and stakeholders. Participatory GIS mapping is used as a direct means of co-producing knowledge with stakeholder and community interests. This paper drives a shift from development of participatory approaches to adaptive applications in real-world case studies of local, national and international policy relevance. The results from four sites along the UK North Sea coast are presented. This paper showcases a robust stakeholder-driven approach that can be used to inform marine planning, conservation management and coastal development. Although the demonstration sites are UK-focused, the methodology presented is of global significance and can be applied across spatial and temporal scales

Recovery and nonrecovery of freshwater food webs from the effects of acidification

Many previous attempts to understand how ecological networks respond to and recover from environmental stressors have been hindered by poorly resolved and unreplicated food web data. Few studies have assessed how the topological structure of large, replicated collections of food webs recovers from perturbations. We analysed food web data taken from 23 UK freshwaters, sampled repeatedly over 24 years, yielding a collection of 442 stream and lake food webs. Our main goal was to determine the effect of acidity on food web structure and to analyse the way food web structure recovered from the effects of acidity over time. Long-term monotonic reversals of acidification were evident at many of the sites, but the ecological responses were generally far less evident than chemical changes, or absent. Across the acidity gradient, food web linkage density and network efficiency declined with increasing acidity, while node redundancy (i.e. trophic similarity among species within a web) increased. Within individual sites, connectance, linkage density, trophic height, resource vulnerability and network efficiency tended to increase over time as sites recovered from acidification, while consumer generality and node redundancy tended to decrease. There was evidence for a lag in biological recovery, as those sites showing a recovery in both their biology and their chemistry were a nested subset of those which only showed a chemistry trend. These findings support the notion that food web structure is fundamentally altered by acidity, and that inertia within the food web may be hindering biological recovery. This suggestion of lagged recovery highlights the importance of long-term monitoring when assessing the impacts of anthropogenic stressors on the natural world. This temporal dimension, and recognition that species interactions can shape community dynamics, is missing from most national biomonitoring schemes, which often rely on space-for-time proxies

Freshwater umbrella - the effects of nitrogen deposition & climate change on freshwaters in the UK

In upland areas of the UK located away from direct human disturbance through agriculture, industrial activities and urban pollution, atmospheric pollution poses one of the major threats to the chemical and biological quality of lakes and streams. One of the most important groups of pollutants is nitrogen (N) compounds, including oxidised forms of N called NOx, generated mainly by fossil fuel combustion especially in motor vehicles, and reduced forms of N (ammonia gas or dissolved ammonium compounds) generated mainly from agricultural activities and livestock. These nitrogen compounds may dissolve in rain or soilwater to form acids, or may be taken up as nutrients by plants and soil microbes in upland catchments, and then subsequently released in acid form associated with nitrate leaching at a later date. It is well established that nitrate leaching contributes to acidification of upland waters, with damage to aquatic ecosystems including plants, invertebrates and fish. However it has recently been suggested that nitrate leaching may also be associated with nutrient enrichment of upland waters that contain biological communities adapted to very low nutrient levels